g dissipated. Of course,
Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this
does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of
personal experience in the writing of drama. His boy, Hamnet, died in
1596, about the time that he was writing _The Merchant of Venice_ and
the rollicking farce of _The Taming of the Shrew_, and just before he
conceived Falstaff; it was fourteen years later that he gave us the
pathetic figure of the young Mamillius in _The Winter's Tale_. From all
we know of his personal life, the years of _King Lear_ and _Othello_
were years of abounding prosperity. The _lacrimae rerum_ that touch the
mind in these stupendous tragedies are the outcome of profound
meditation and vivid imagination, not the accompaniment of a cry of
instant pain. However we are to reconstruct the spiritual biography of
Shakespeare, it is clear that it is by no such simple reading of his
life in terms of his treatment of comic or tragic themes.

The other line of explanation will suggest itself to any thoughtful
student who contemplates the facts summed up in Chapter V on the
Elizabethan drama. Whatever Shakespeare's preeminence in the quality of
his work, he was not singular for innovations in kind. Not only are the
plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but
throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing
varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which
the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy,
tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented
by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it
promised to lead to popular success. This does not mean that he did not
put conscience into his work, but only that the change in type of play
perceptible from period to period is more safely to be explained by
changes of theatrical fashion and public taste than by conjectures as to
the inner life of the dramatist. Nor are we prevented from finding here
too that great good fortune as to occasion and opportunity that is
needed, along with whatever natural endowment, to explain the
achievement of Shakespeare. The return of the vogue of tragedy after he
had attained maturity and seen life was indeed happy for him and for us;
as was the rise of the imaginative type of dramatic romance when the
storm and stress of his youth had gone by. Had the theatrical demand
call