merry Fressingfield.

In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not
only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable
advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection,
hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the
equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are
certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more developed state of
the art. But the work of this early school settled the shape which the
English drama was to take. It fixed the practice and traditions of the
national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole
of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in
the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It
decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue,
bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions,
hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle,
murder, and sudden death. It established blank verse, with occasional
riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the
language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language
of the low comedy and "business" parts. And it introduced songs, a
feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like
all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old
forms to finer purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even
the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the
old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.

Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the
world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious
persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of
reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by
Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making
serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is
startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or
perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that
his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and
fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric
poems s