in England as
they never did before, or since, in any such space of time. Within a few
years of the beginning of this time Shakespeare became the principal
writer for, and later on a sharer in, a company of players which, at
about the same time, was chosen as the favourite Court company; a
position which--under various titles--it continued to hold
thereafterwards for over forty years.

When we compare the plays of Shakespeare with those of his
contemporaries and immediate successors, it becomes evident that this
dominant position was maintained by his company largely through the
superior merit of his work while he lived, and by the prestige he had
attained for it after he had passed away.

In the time of Elizabeth the stage was recognised as one of the
principal vehicles for the reflection of opinion concerning matters of
public interest; the players being, in Shakespeare's phrase, "the
abstract and brief chronicles of the time." The fact that laws were
passed and Orders in Council issued prohibiting the representation of
matters of Church or State upon the stage, clearly implies the
prevalence of such representations. It is altogether unlikely that the
most popular dramatist of the day should, in this phase of his art, have
remained an exception to the rule.

I hold it to have been impossible that such an ardent Englishman as
Shakespeare, one also so deeply interested in human motive, character,
and action, should have lived during these fifteen years in the heart of
English literary and political life,--coming, through his professional
interests, frequently and closely in contact with certain of its central
figures,--and should during this interval have written twenty original
plays, three long poems, and over one hundred and fifty sonnets, without
leaving in this work decipherable reflections of the characters and
movements of his time. That these conscious, or unconscious, reflections
have not long ago been recognised and interpreted I impute to the lack
of an intimate knowledge of contemporary history on the part of the
majority of his critics and biographers.

Competent text critics, in their efforts to establish the chronological
order of the dramas, have long since displayed the facts that
Shakespeare's earlier original plays were largely comedies of a joyous
nature, and that, as the years pass, his work becomes more serious and
philosophical; in time developing into the pessimistic bitterness of
_Lear_ and