ed to rewrite or retouch. That graceless
vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent death-bed his old
friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from
"spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully
declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that,
with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an
absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene
in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the
productions of others includes some dramas which have not been
preserved, as the company to which Shakespeare was attached owned the
manuscripts of a great number of plays which were never printed; and it
was a custom, when a play had popular elements in it, for other
dramatists to be employed in making such additions as would give
continual novelty to the old favorite. But of the plays published in our
editions of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that "The Comedy of
Errors," and the three parts of "King Henry VI.," are only partially
his, and should be classed among his early adaptations, and not among
his early creations. The play of "Pericles" bears no marks of his mind,
except in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty, which start up
from the rest of the work like towers of gold from a plain of sand; but
these scenes are in his latest manner. In regard to the tragedy of
"Titus Andronicus," we are so constituted as to resist all the external
evidence by which such a shapeless mass of horrors and absurdities is
fastened on Shakespeare. Mr. Verplanck thinks it one of Shakespeare's
first attempts at dramatic composition; but first attempts must reflect
the mental condition of the author at the time they were made; and we
know the mental condition of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his
poem of "Venus and Adonis," which he expressly styles "the first heir of
his invention." Now leaving out of view the fact that "Titus Andronicus"
stamps the impression, not of youthful, but of matured depravity of
taste, its execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not have
proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in which the poem had its
birth. The best criticism on "Titus Andronicus" was made by Robert
Burns, when he was nine years old. His schoolmaster was reading the play
aloud in his father's cottage, and when he came to the