ical order, we encounter many practical difficulties in
finding just what this order is. We know that Tennyson developed a
great deal as a poet between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three; and
we can show this by pointing to four successive volumes of his poems,
published respectively at the ages of eighteen, twenty-one,
twenty-three, and thirty-three, and each rising in merit above the one
before it. We know definitely in what order these volumes come, for we
find on the title-page of each the date when it was printed. But
scarcely half of Shakespeare's plays were printed in this way during
his life. The others, some twenty in all, are found only in one big
folio volume which gives no hint of their proper order or year of
composition, and which bears on its title-page the date of the
printing, 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died. Many plays, too,
published {75} early, were written some years before publication, so
that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the quarto, even where a
quarto exists, simply shows that the play was written sometime before
that year but does not tell at all _how long_ before. How, then, are
we to trace Shakespeare's growth from year to year, through his
successive dramas, when the quartos help us so little and when the
majority of these dramas are piled before us in one volume by the
editors of the First Folio, without a word of explanation as to which
plays are early attempts and which mature work?

At first sight the above problem seems almost hopeless. The researches
of scholars for over a century, however, have gathered together a mass
of evidence which determines pretty accurately the order in which these
different plays were written.

This evidence is of two kinds, external and internal. By external
evidence we mean that found _outside_ of the play, references to it in
other books of the time, and similar material. By internal evidence we
mean that found _inside_ of the play itself.

+External Evidence+.--This is of several kinds. In the first place,
every play which was to be printed had to be entered in the Stationers'
Register, and all these entries are dated. Hence we know that certain
plays were prepared for publication by the time mentioned. For
instance, "A Book called Antony and Cleopatra" was entered May 20,
1608; and although apparently the book was not finally printed at that
time, and although our only copy of _Antony and Cleopatra_ is that in
the Foli