ed for tragedy when Shakespeare was in the early thirties and light
comedy when he was in the forties, it seems likely that he would have
responded to the demand, though we can hardly suppose that the result
would have been as fortunate as in the existing state of things it
proved to be.

[Page Heading: Dates of the Poems]

The foregoing discussion has been confined to Shakespeare's plays; the
poems present problems of their own. _Venus and Adonis_ (1593) and
_Lucrece_ (1594), indeed, resemble the plays of the first period, with
which they are contemporary, both in conforming to a familiar type then
much in vogue, the re-telling in ornate style of classical legends drawn
chiefly from Ovid, and in exhibiting marks of the conscious exercise of
technical dexterity. They show the Shakespeare of the dramas mainly in
their revelation of a remarkable power of detailed observation and their
richness of phrase and fluency of versification. Vivid and eloquent
though they are, they can hardly be regarded as affording a sure
prophecy of the passion and power of characterization that mark his
mature dramatic production.

The case of the _Sonnets_ is very different. From Meres's mention of
them in 1598 we know that some had been written and were being
circulated in manuscript by that date, and certain critics have sought
to assign the main body of them to the first half of the last decade of
the sixteenth century. But they were not published till 1609, and many
of the greatest strike a note of emotion more profound than can be heard
before the date of _Hamlet_. In writing them, Shakespeare was, to be
sure, following a vogue, but as Professor Alden has pointed out in his
introduction to them in the Tudor Shakespeare, they stand apart in
important respects from the ordinary sonnet sequences of the time. All
our researches have failed to tell us to whom they were addressed, if,
indeed, they were addressed to any actual person at all; it is hardly
necessary to urge that Shakespeare was capable of profound and
passionate utterance under the impulse of imagination alone. The
probability is that they were produced at intervals over a period of
perhaps a dozen years, and that they represent a great variety of moods,
impulses, and suggestions. While some of them betray signs of youth and
remind us of the apprentice workman of _Loves Labour's Lost_, others
display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb
power of incisive