erican scholar whose name has hardly yet crossed the
Atlantic,--Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike,--has lately made some
studies in dramatic chronology which go far to confirm the unromantic
conjecture that to the end Shakspere remained imitative and little else.
Professor Thorndike, for example, has shown with convincing probability
that certain old plays concerning Robin Hood proved popular; a little
later, Shakspere produced the woods and outlaws of 'As You Like It.' The
question is one of pure chronology; and pure chronology has convinced
me, for one, that the forest scenes of Arden were written to fit
available costumes and properties.... Again, Professor Thorndike has
shown that Roman subjects grew popular, and tragedies of revenge such as
Marston's; a little later, Shakspere wrote 'Julius Caesar' and 'Hamlet.'
With much more elaboration Professor Thorndike has _virtually proved_
that the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher--different both in motive and
in style from any popular plays which had preceded them--were
conspicuously successful on the London stage before Shakspere began to
write romances. It seems likely, therefore, that 'Cymbeline,' which less
careful chronology had conjectured to be a model for Beaumont and
Fletcher, was in fact imitated from models which they had made. In other
words, Professor Thorndike has shown that one may account for all the
changes in Shakspere, after 1600, by merely assuming that the most
skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists,
remained to the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set
by others."

Again, he says: "The likeness of their work to the romances of
Shakspere--in subject, in structure, in peculiarities of verse,--has
been often remarked; and they have consequently been supposed to have
begun by skilful superficial imitation of his spiritually ripest phase.
The question is one of chronology not yet fixed in detail; but as I have
told you already, the studies of my friend Professor Thorndike have
virtually proved that several of their plays must have been in existence
decidedly before the dates commonly assigned to 'Cymbeline,' the
'Tempest' or the 'Winter's Tale.' If he is right,--and I believe him
so,--the relation commonly thought to have existed between them and
Shakspere is precisely reversed. Shakspere was the imitator, not they;
indeed, as we have seen, he was from the beginning an imitator, not an
inventor. And here