owner.

Before he was thirty, he was well known as a dramatist. There is good evidence of his familiar association with eminent dramatists and with other great men of his day, and he attracted the favorable notice of Queen Elizabeth. He grew prosperous and acquired considerable property in his native Stratford. For many years he lived mostly in London, but visited his old home from time to time. At about the age of fifty, he retired to Stratford, gave up his dramatic career, and passed his last years in the quiet life of a country gentleman. He died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, and was buried in the chancel of the Stratford parish church. These bare facts of his life tell us little of his inward experience. The spiritual history of the man we must read, if at all, in his works.

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His first

The whole body of Shakespeare's writings falls naturally into three divisions, corresponding to three different Shake- manifestations of his poetic or dramatic power. speare's Mis- These divisions consist of his miscellaneous Poems poems, his sonnets, and his dramas. known poem was Venus and Adonis. He called it "the first heir of my invention," and dedicated it to his noble friend and patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. It is above all things a poem of youth, but of youth endowed with genius and filled with poetic passion. Sensuousness is the word that best expresses its dominating quality. We feel that the poet was alive to all the physical beauty of the world about him, that all his senses were avenues of fresh delight. Whatever faults the poem may have are simply the excess of the youthful poetic temperament. Its merits are such as form the proper groundwork for his later poetic and dramatic achievements. The poem is filled with the charm of rural nature, made vital by the sympathetic treatment of passionate love. What an eye for natural detail and what a faculty for concrete imagery are illustrated in the description of the wild boar :

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On his bow-back he hath a battle set

Of bristly pikes, that ever threat his foes;

His eyes, like glow-worms, shine when he doth fret ;
His snout digs sepulchres where'er he goes.

What power of imaginative suggestion in the words:
Whereat amazed, as one that unaware

Hath dropp'd a precious jewel in the flood.

Lucrece is a bitterly tragic story, going beyond Venus and Adonis in seriousness and depth, but characterized by many of the same qualities. The reader is here more disturbed by the fanciful conceits and puns, such as,

So I at each sad strain will strain a tear.

On the other hand there is a growing sententiousness of expression which illustrates Shakespeare's own growth in worldly wisdom. In the following stanza, almost every line is a separate aphorism, all circling around the same general idea:

'Tis double death to drown in ken of shore;

He ten times pines that pines beholding food;

To see the salve doth make the wound ache more;
Great grief grieves most at that would do it good;
Deep woes roll forward like a gentle flood,

Who, being stopp'd, the bounding banks o'erflows;
Grief dallied with nor law nor limit knows.

Minor poems of the same group are A Lover's Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim, and The Phænix and the Turtle.

Shake

If Venus and Adonis displays the poet's earthly and sensual part, the Sonnets may be said to illustrate his transition to a higher plane of life and thought. They are moved by strong passion, but they take speare's Sona vastly wider sweep of thought and of poetic invention. Their theme is love-the love of man for man and the love of man for woman; and that theme is treated with a poetic power matched only by the profound knowl

nets

edge of the human heart. The whole number of the Sonnets is one hundred and fifty-four. The first one hundred and twenty-six are addresed to a certain noble and beautiful youth, "a man right fair"; and the remainder are addressed to a certain dark lady, “a woman coloured ill." The young man is praised for his noble. qualities of mind and person, is warned against the temptations that beset his rank, is urged to marry and to perpetuate himself in his offspring.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's rose might never die.

He is continually addressed in language of passionate tenderness, language that bespeaks a love "passing the love of women." Even in the friend's absence and alienation, this love remains constant. It desires to see the loved one redeemed from evil courses and faithful to his own best self.

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.

The sonnets addressed to the "dark woman seem to imply on her part an irresistible fascination, but a fickle, selfish, and impure heart. She has been false to the poet, she has come between him and his friend, yet he can not break away from her evil spell. It may well be conceived how many phases of love these situations involved and what opportunities were given to Shakespeare for showing his unparalleled insight into the workings of the human heart. The question remains whether the Sonnets reflect actual personal experiences of Shakespeare's life. Did he here "unlock his heart," or did he not? Some have seen in these poems merely a poet's flattery of a noble and influential patron. Others have regarded them as mere literary exercises, in which the poet studied and expressed those human moods which in his dramas he was