stablished blank verse, {108} with occasional riming couplets at the
close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy
and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and
"business" parts. And it introduced songs, a feature of which
Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets,
invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer
purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even the old
chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old
jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.

Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the
world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious
persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of
reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by
Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making
serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is
startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or
perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that
his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred
and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the
Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost
prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of
his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine
years old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in
a sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he
was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor,
playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars
and the Globe Theaters. He seemingly prospered in his calling and
retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he
had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus
and Adonis_ was printed in 1593, the _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his
_Sonnets_ in 1609. So far as is known, only eighteen of the
thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed
during his life-time. These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and
were little more than stage books, or librettos. The first collected
edition of his works was the so-called "First Folio" of 162