of tragic history from his more experienced fellows may be
seen in _Richard III_, in which he can be observed following in the
footsteps of Marlowe in the treatment of meter, in the rhetorical and
lyrical nature of the dialogue, and in the conception of the central
character. Even less of his individual quality is to be discerned in the
field of tragedy, for the most that can be claimed for him in _Titus
Andronicus_ is the re-combination of the repellent episodes of that
crude specimen of the tragedy of blood, and the rewriting of the lines
which occasionally cloak the horrors with passages of poetry. If, as is
unlikely, the first form of _Romeo and Juliet_ was written in this
period, the extant form must show it so radically revised that it leaves
us little ground for generalization as to his power in tragedy in this
first period.

It was in comedy that Shakespeare first showed originality. _Love's
Labour's Lost_ is one of the few plays whose plots seem to have been due
to his own invention; and full of sparkle and grace as it is, it bears
obvious marks of the _tour de force_, the young writer's conscious
testing of his powers in social satire, in comic situation, and most of
all in verbal mastery and the manipulation of dialogue. In _The Comedy
of Errors_ he had the advantage of a definite model in the well-defined
type of the Plautian comedy; but here again in the doubling of the twins
and the elaboration of the entanglements there are traces of the
beginner's delight in technic for its own sake. The clearly contrasted
types in the two pairs of heroes and heroines of _The Two Gentlemen of
Verona_ point to a conscious effort in characterization, as the author's
attention had been concentrated on dialogue and on situation in the
other two comedies of this group. Thus, regarding the variety of kind
and the nature of his achievement in these first eight or nine plays, we
can hardly fail to acquiesce in the general opinion that views the first
period as one of experiment.

[Page Heading: Second Period]

The chronicle history was the Elizabethan dramatic form whose
possibilities were first exhausted. _King John_ had been only a making
over of an earlier work, and perhaps the most significant single change
Shakespeare made was the excision of the anti-Romanist bias which in the
older play had made John a Protestant hero. Yet this history voices,
too, in the speeches of Faulconbridge, that patriotic enthusiasm which
finds