he was ever one of the royal actors, we may be sure that he must have witnessed, either at Stratford or London, some of the inimitable performances of the company's star, the celebrated Richard Tarlton. This individual, the "pleasant Willy" of Spenser, who died in September, 1588, was the most popular comedian of the day, one of those instinctive humorists who have merely to show their faces to be greeted with roars of merriment. It may have been, when the part of Derick, the clown, was in his hands, that Shakespeare became acquainted with the Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, a lively play, some of the incidents of which he unquestionably recollected when composing his histories of that sovereign and his predecessor. There was another drama that was played in London about the same time, one in which Tarlton's personation of a dissolute youth was singularly popular and long remembered. In this latter was a death-bed scene, a notice of which may be worth giving as an example of the dramatic incidents that were relished in the poet's early days;-A wealthy father, in the last extremity of illness, communicates his testamentary intentions to his three sons. His landed estates are alloted to the eldest, who, overcome with emotion, expresses a fervent wish that the invalid may yet survive to enjoy them himself. To the next, who is a scholar, are left a handsome annuity and a very large sum of money for the purchase of books. Affected equally with his brother, he declares that he has no wish for such gifts, and only hopes that the testator may live to enjoy them himself. The third son, represented by Tarlton, was now summoned to the bed-side, and a grotesque figure he must have appeared in a costume which is described by an eye-witness as including a torn and dirty shirt, a one

sleeved coat, stockings out at heels, and a head-dress of feathers and straw. "As for you, sirrah," quoths the indignant parent, "you know how often I have fetched you out of Newgate and Bridewell;-you have been an ungracious villain;-I have nothing to bequeath to you but the gallows and a rope." Following the example of the others, Tarlton bursts into a flood of tears, and then, falling on his knees, sobbingly exclaims,-"O, father, I do not desire them;—I trust to Heaven you shall live to enjoy them yourself."

It may be gathered, from the poet's subsequent history, that his return to Stratford-on-Avon was merely of a temporary character. The actors of those days were, as a rule, individual wanderers, spending a large portion of their time at a distance from their families; and there is every reason for believing that this was the case with Shakespeare from the period of his arrival in London until nearly the end of his life. All the old theatrical companies were more or less of an itinerant character, and it is all but impossible that he should not have already commenced his provincial tours. But what were their directions, or who were his associates, have not been discovered. There is not, indeed, a single particle of evidence respecting his career during the next five years, that is to say, from the time of the Lambert negotiation, in 1587, until he is discovered as a rising actor and dramatist in 1592.

This interval must have been the chief period of Shakespeare's literary education. Removed prematurely from school; residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighborhood; thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress-it is difficult to believe that, when he

first left Stratford, he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments. He could not, at all events, under the circumstances in which he had then so long been placed, have had the opportunity of acquiring a refined style of composition. After he had once, however, gained a footing in London, he would have been placed under different conditions. Books of many kinds would have been accessible to him, and he would have been almost daily within hearing of the best dramatic poetry of the age. There would also no doubt have been occasional facilities for picking up a little smattering of the continental languages, and it is almost beyond a doubt that he added somewhat to his classical knowledge during his residence in the metropolis. It is, for instance, hardly possible that the Amores of Ovid, whence he derived his earliest motto, could have been one of his school-books.

Although Shakespeare had exhibited a taste for poetic composition before his first departure from Stratford-onAvon, all traditions agree in the statement that he was a recognized actor before he joined the ranks of the dramatists. This latter event appears to have occurred on March 3, 1592, when a new drama, entitled Henry, or Harry, the Sixth, was brought out by Lord Strange's Servants, then acting either at Newington or Southwark under an arrangement with Henslowe, a wealthy stage manager, to whom no doubt the author had sold the play. In this year, as we learn on unquestionable authority, Shakespeare was first rising into prominent notice, so that the history then produced, now known as the First Part of Henry the Sixth, was, in all probability, his earliest complete dramatic work. Its extraordinary success must have secured for the author a substantial position in the theatrical world

of the day. The play had, for those times, an unusually long run, so that Nash, writing in or before the following month of July, states that the performances of it had, in that short interval, been witnessed by "ten thousand spectators at least," and, although this estimate may be overstrained, there can be no hesitation in receiving it as a valid testimony to the singular popularity of the new drama. The Second Part of Henry the Sixth must have appeared soon afterward, but no record of its production on the stage has been preserved. The former drama was published for the first time in the collective edition of 1623. A garbled and spurious version of the second play, the unskillful work of some one who had not access to a perfect copy of the original, appeared in the year 1594 under the title of the First Part of the Contention betwixt the Houses of York and Lancaster. It was published by Millington, the same bookseller who afterwards issued the surreptitious edition of Henry the Fifth.

Robert Greene, a popular writer and dramatist, who had commenced his literary career nine years previously, died on September 3, 1592. In a work entitled the Groatsworth of Wit, written shortly before his death, he had travestied, in an interesting sarcastic episode respecting some of his contemporaries, a line from one of Shakespeare's then recent compositions, O, tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide! This line is of extreme interest as including the earliest record of words composed by the great dramatist. It forms part of a vigorous speech which is as Shakespearean in its natural characterial fidelity, as it is Marlowean in its diction. That speech of the unfortunate Duke of York's is one of the most striking in the play, and the above line was probably selected for quo

tation by Greene on account of its popularity through effective delivery. The quotation shows that the Third Part of Henry the Sixth was written previously to September, 1592, and hence it may be concluded that all Shakespeare's plays on the subject of that reign, although perhaps subsequently revised in a few places by the author, were originally produced in that year. A surreptitious and tinkered version of the third part, made up by an inferior hand chiefly out of imperfect materials, appeared in 1595 under the title of the Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and therein stated to have been "sundry times acted by the Earl of Pembroke's servants."

There is no reason for wonder in the style of a young author being influenced by that of a popular and accomplished contemporary, and judgment on the authorship of much of the above-named plays should not be ruled by a criticism which can only fairly be applied to the rapidly approaching period when the great dramatist had outlived the possibility of appearing in the character of an imitative writer. That Shakespeare commenced his literary vocation as, to some extent, a follower of Marlowe can hardly be denied, even were the line quoted by Greene the only remnant of his early plays; and that the three parts of Henry the Sixth had been some years on the stage, when Henry the Fifth was produced in 1599, may be gathered from that interesting relic of literary autobiography, the final chorus to the latter play. No theory respecting the history of the former dramas is wholly free from embarrassing perplexities, but that which best agrees with the positive evidences is that which concedes the authorship of the three plays to Shakespeare, their production to the year 1592, and the quarto editions of the second and