Development as a Dramatist.—­It is possible to study some of Shakespeare’s plays with increased interest, if we note the reasons for assigning them to certain periods of his life.  We conclude that Love’s Labor’s Lost, for instance, is an early play, because of its form,—­excess of rime, small proportion of blank verse, lack of mastery of poetic expression,—­and also because it suffers from the puns, conceits, and overdrawn wit and imagery of his early work.  Almost one half of the 2789 lines of Love’s Labor’s Lost rime, while there are only 579 lines of blank verse.  Of the 2064 lines in The Tempest, one of the last of his plays, 1458 are in blank verse.  The plays of his first period show less freedom in the use of verse.  He dislikes to let his meaning run over into the next line without a pause, and he hesitates to introduce those extra syllables which give such wonderful variety to his later work.  As he grows older, he also uses more prose. Romeo and Juliet has 405 lines of prose in a total of 3052 lines, while Hamlet, a tragedy of 3931 lines, has 1208 lines of prose.

His treatment of his characters is even a more significant index to his growth than the form of his dramas.  In the earlier plays, his men and women are more engaged with external forces than with internal struggles.  In as excellent an early tragedy as Romeo and Juliet, the hero fights more with outside obstacles than with himself.  In the great later tragedies, the internal conflict is more emphasized, as in the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth.  “See thou character” became in an increasing degree Shakespeare’s watchword.  He grew to care less for mere incident, for plots based on mistaken identity, as in The Comedy of Errors; but he became more and more interested in the delineation of character, in showing the effect of evil on Macbeth and his wife, of jealousy on Othello, of indecision on Hamlet, as well as in exploring the ineffectual attempts of many of his characters to escape the consequences of their acts.

Sources of his Plots.—­We should have had fewer plays from Shakespeare, if he had been compelled to take the time to invent new plots.  The sources of the plots of his plays may usually be found in some old chronicle, novel, biography, or older play.  Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published when Shakespeare was fourteen years old, gives the stories of Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and of all the English kings who are the heroes of the historical plays.  As Holinshed is very dry reading, if Shakespeare had followed him closely, for instance, in King Lear, the play would have lost its most impressive parts.  There is not in Holinshed even a suggestion of the Falstaff of Henry IV., that veritable “comic Hamlet,” who holds a unique place among the humorous characters of the world.

North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, published when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, became his textbook of ancient history and furnished him the raw material for plays like Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.