These varied types are quite enough to show with what doubtful and unguided experiments our first dramatists were engaged, like men first setting out in rafts and dugouts on an unknown sea.  They are the more interesting when we remember that Shakespeare tried them all; that he is the only dramatist whose plays cover the whole range of the drama from its beginning to its decline.  From the stage spectacle he developed the drama of human life; and instead of the doggerel and bombast of our first plays he gives us the poetry of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream.  In a word, Shakespeare brought order out of dramatic chaos.  In a few short years he raised the drama from a blundering experiment to a perfection of form and expression which has never since been rivaled.

IV.  SHAKESPEARE

One who reads a few of Shakespeare’s great plays and then the meager story of his life is generally filled with a vague wonder.  Here is an unknown country boy, poor and poorly educated according to the standards of his age, who arrives at the great city of London and goes to work at odd jobs in a theater.  In a year or two he is associated with scholars and dramatists, the masters of their age, writing plays of kings and clowns, of gentlemen and heroes and noble women, all of whose lives he seems to know by intimate association.  In a few years more he leads all that brilliant group of poets and dramatists who have given undying glory to the Age of Elizabeth.  Play after play runs from his pen, mighty dramas of human life and character following one another so rapidly that good work seems impossible; yet they stand the test of time, and their poetry is still unrivaled in any language.  For all this great work the author apparently cares little, since he makes no attempt to collect or preserve his writings.  A thousand scholars have ever since been busy collecting, identifying, classifying the works which this magnificent workman tossed aside so carelessly when he abandoned the drama and retired to his native village.  He has a marvelously imaginative and creative mind; but he invents few, if any, new plots or stories.  He simply takes an old play or an old poem, makes it over quickly, and lo! this old familiar material glows with the deepest thoughts and the tenderest feelings that ennoble our humanity; and each new generation of men finds it more wonderful than the last.  How did he do it?  That is still an unanswered question and the source of our wonder.

There are, in general, two theories to account for Shakespeare.  The romantic school of writers have always held that in him “all came from within”; that his genius was his sufficient guide; and that to the overmastering power of his genius alone we owe all his great works.  Practical, unimaginative men, on the other hand, assert that in Shakespeare “all came from without,” and that we must study his environment rather than his genius, if we