to
devise. Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his day
he was thus engaged during the first years of his connection with the
stage, we should naturally have expected to find him handling the text of
Marlowe with more of reverence and less of freedom than that of meaner
men: ready, as in the _Contention_, to clear away with no timid hand
their weaker and more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant it by
worthier matter of his own; but when occupied in recasting the verse of
Marlowe, not less ready to confine his labour to such slight and skilful
strokes of art as that which has led us into this byway of speculation;
to the correction of a false note, the addition of a finer touch, the
perfection of a meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music;
to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right word
for the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler; to the excision of
such archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stage
of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style, survivals of the
earliest form or habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, however
humble in our present eyes, which look before and after, would assuredly
have been worthy of the workman and his task; an office no less fruitful
of profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupil hand of the future master,
than the subordinate handiwork of the young Raffaelle or Leonardo on the
canvas of Verrocchio or Perugino.

Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have been with more or less show
of reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here
no more to say than that I purpose in the proper place to take account of
the only two among them which bear the slightest trace of any possible
touch of his hand. For these two there is not, as it happens, the least
witness of tradition or outward likelihood which might warrant us in
assigning them a place apart from the rest, and nearer the chance of
reception into the rank that has been claimed for them; while those plays
in whose favour there is some apparent evidence from without, such as the
fact of early or even original attribution to the master's hand, are,
with one possible exception, utterly beyond the pale of human
consideration as at any stage whatever the conceivable work of
Shakespeare.

Considering that his two attempts at narrative or rather semi-narrative
and semi-reflective poetry belong obviously to an early stage o