Stay'd me a prisoner in my chamber when Those suns of glory, those two lights of men Nor. "Twixt Guynes and Arde: I was then present, saw them salute on horseback; Which had they, what four throned ones could have The view of earthly glory: men might say, Till this time pomp was single, but now married and so on to a brilliant description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The calm rationality of this dialogue, its almost prosaic modernity, its profound acknowledg ment of the actual conditions of fact combined with a free, breaking use of blank-verse and of not too extravagant metaphor, are more than enough to remind us, if we needed reminding, of the conventions which beset the stage when Shakspere's work ended. Whether his or not, these lines are such as in the end he might have written. From the doubtful Henry VI. we have proceeded through a long series of indubitably genuine works to the equally doubtful Henry VIII. Nowhere on the way has any work seemed very unlike those about it. The contrast between the first doubt and the last, then, is startling; nothing could more clearly demonstrate how Shakspere marks the progress of English Literature from a state which seems wholly of the past to one which seems almost like the present. For our purposes, we need look no longer at Henry VIII. VI. SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1612. For our purposes, too, we need pause very little to summarize our impression of the last works of Shakspere, as they have appeared in this chapter. Details of their dates can never be decisively settled. There is every reason to believe, however, that, in some order or other, the plays we have here considered were all written after those which we considered before, and that they virtually complete Shakspere's work. Allowing them the widest chronological range admitted by any consenting criticism, we find them to belong to the years of Shakspere's life which carried him from forty-five to forty-eight, and from the twenty-second year of his professional work to the twenty-fifth and last. In all three of the unquestioned plays, and quite as much in the doubtful Henry VIII., we found constant traces of declining creative power, which even the tremendous technical efforts of Cymbeline and the Tempest and the Winter's Tale were powerless to conceal. What impulse was left the man, after the complete break of his spontaneous power in Timon and Pericles, was an impulse rather of philosophic thought than of artistic emotion. For such a purpose there are few worse vehicles than the public stage. Compare with these plays, now, the general records of publication during the years in question.1 In 1609, the year to which we conjecturally assigned Cymbeline, Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy is said to have been acted; and among the publications were not only the Sonnets, Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, -the last three works of Shakspere which originally appeared during his lifetime, but the final version of Daniel's Civil Wars, Dekker's Gull's Hornbook, Drayton's Lord Cromwell, Jonson's Epicone and The Case is Altered, and the Douay translation of the Bible. In 1610, the year to which we conjecturally assigned the Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle and Jonson's Alchemist are said to have been acted; and among the publications were Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, twelve books of Chapman's Iliad, Donne's Pseudo-Martyr, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, and the final edition of the Mirror for Magistrates. In 1611, the year to which we conjecturally assigned the Winter's Tale, Beaumont and Fletcher's King and No King, and Jonson's Catiline were acted; and among the publications were twelve more books of Chapman's Iliad, Coryat's Cru 1 Ryland: Chronological Outlines of English Literature. dities, Dekker and Middleton's Roaring Girl, Donne's Anatomy of the World, Speed's History of Great Britain, Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy, and the Authorized Version of the Bible. In 1612, the year to which more conjecturally still-we assigned Henry VIII., came the second edition of Bacon's Essays, two plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Hall's Contemplations, and John Webster's White Devil, whose preface, as we have seen, mentioned Shakspere as an honored tradition.1 The hasty list is enough for our purpose. At this time, when Shakspere's power showed plain signs of weakening, English Literature was at once more modern and more fertile than ever. Of the riper dramatists, whose work is full of effective invention, all but the distinctly decadent Ford and Massinger were in their prime. There is small wonder, then, that Shakspere wrote no more. Competition was stronger than ever; and, at the same time, his purposes had outgrown his vehicle, and his spontaneous impulse had ceased. Both as an artist and as a man he had more to lose than to gain. 1 See pp. 20, 408. XII WILLIAM SHAKSPERE WE have now reached the last stage of our study. We have glanced at the facts of Shakspere's life; we have briefly considered the condition of English Literature when his work began; and, with what detail has proved possible, we have considered, in conjecturally chronological order, all the works commonly ascribed to him. The few remaining works which are probably more or less his- Edward III., the Two Noble Kinsmen, and a few lyrics are not generally included in the standard editions. Less accessible, then, than what we have considered, they are also less interesting; nor do they contain anything which should alter our conclusions. Our conclusions, however, may well be affected by another matter at which we have glanced, the English literature, in general, which came into existence between 1587 and 1612, during which interval, in some order or other, the works of Shakspere were certainly produced. We are ready, then, finally to review our impressions. In looking back over our course, perhaps nothing is more notable than its limits. We are so far from having covered the whole subject of Shakspere, that |