1616, "Will. Shakspere, gent.," was buried in the church of Stratford.

All the rest of the story-how he died on his fifty-second birthday, how undue merry-making had something to do with it, how he made a doggerel epitaph for John Combe, and so on-is mere legend. Every known fact we have before us, except perhaps the fact that the editors of the Centurie of Prayse, who are a shade over-eager, have discovered more than a hundred1 allusions to Shakspere between 1592 and 1616. At first sight, the record seems very meagre.

On reflection, though, it tells more of a story than at first seems the case. The son of a country tradesman who was beginning to improve his condition, Shakspere, in early youth, met with family misfortune, and made at best an imprudent marriage. Until the age of twenty-three, he was still in these circumstances. At twenty-eight he had established himself as an actor, a dramatist, and a poet in London. At thirty-two he had begun to help his father, and incidentally the family name of Shakspere, back into local consideration. At thirty-four he was a landed proprietor, a person who could be useful to country friends visiting London, and at least in the opinion of Francis Meresa first-rate literary figure. Till forty-five he maintained his professional position, constantly strengthening himself as a land

1 Including those published in Fresh Allusions: New Shakspere Society, 1886.

holder meanwhile. From forty-five to fifty-two, he was a country gentleman of Stratford. Prosaic enough this looks at first sight; but, to whoever will sympathetically appreciate the motives which have made Englishmen what Englishmen have been, it is not without its heroic side. We have had cant enough about snobbishness. A true-hearted Englishman always wants to die a gentleman if he can; and here, in the facts of Shakspere's life, we have the record of an Englishman, who, from a position which might easily have lapsed into peasantry, worked his way, in the end, to one of lasting local dignity.

III

LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE IN ENGLAND UNTIL 1587

[The best popular history of English Literature is still Stopford Brooke's Primer. The best popular work on Elizabethan Literature is Saintsbury's; the best on the early drama is Addington Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors. More satisfactory than any of these, as far as it goes, is Frederick Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature. For whoever wishes more thorough treatment of the English stage, Mr. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature is useful; and Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, and Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama are very valuable.]

FROM the facts we have just considered, it is clear that in 1587 Shakspere was still at Stratford; and that by 1592 he was already so established a dramatist as to be grouped by Robert Greene with Peele and Marlowe. In the next year, 1593, the publication of Venus and Adonis brings him finally before us as a man of letters. The fact that, in 1587, the Earl of Leicester's players, the company with which he was later associated, paid a professional visit to Stratford, has led some people to surmise that when they returned to London they took him along. Whatever the facts were, we cannot be far wrong in assuming that the state of English Literature in 1587 fairly represents what Shakspere found, just as the

state of things in 1612 fairly represents what Shakspere left.

His literary activity, then, his productive period, we may assume to be limited to twenty-five years, the last sixteen of the reign of Elizabeth and the first nine of the reign of James I. The state of our dramatic literature during this period, and to a great degree that of English poetry, may be adequately studied, for our purposes, in works generally assigned to him. To appreciate these, however, we must first glance at the state of English Literature which immediately precedes them.

Putting aside Chaucer, who was already as solitary a survival of a time long past as he is to-day, we may broadly say that during the first twenty-nine years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, English Literature contained and produced hardly anything permanent; a few lyrics, like Wyatt's Forget not Yet, or Lyly's Cupid and Campaspe, still to be found in any standard collection, may be said to comprise the whole literature of that period which has survived. In a traditional way, however, certain writers of the time remain familiar; without knowing quite what their work is like, people in general have a nebulous idea that the work exists, and at least formerly was of some importance. The earliest of these writers do not strictly belong to the time of Elizabeth at all. Both Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who are commonly regarded as the pioneers of our modern literature, died in the reign of Henry VIII. Their

writings, however, remained chiefly in manuscript until 1557, the year before the accession of Elizabeth. In that year, together with a considerable number of lyrics by other and later men, their songs and sonnets were published in Tottel's Miscellany. With that publication, modern English Literature, we may say, first became accessible to the general public.

By that time, as a hasty glance at the Miscellany, will suffice to show, the movement begun fifteen or twenty years before by Wyatt and Surrey had already progressed considerably. Wyatt was a gentleman, an ambassador, a statesman; Surrey, eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, was a man of the highest rank and fashion. Wyatt, the elder by fourteen years, was by far the more serious character. The fact that nowadays they are commonly grouped together is due not so much to any close personal relation, as to the accident that their works were first printed in the same volume. It is justified historically, however, by the relation which their work bears to what precedes and to what follows. These courtiers, these men whose lives were passed in the most distinguished society of their time, found not only the literature, but even the language, of their native England in a state which, compared with the contemporary French or Italian, may fairly be called barbarous. Each alike did his best to imitate or to reproduce in English the civilized literary forms already prevalent on the Continent. Each, for example, translated sonnets of Petrarch; each made original