_Timon of Athens_, but softening and lightening, at the end
of his career, in the gravely reflective but kindly mood of _Cymbeline_,
_A Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_; yet no serious attempt has ever
been made to trace and demonstrate in the personal contact of the writer
with concurrent life the underlying spiritual causes of these very
palpable changes in his expression of it. Until this is done no
adequate life of Shakespeare can be written.[1]

Now, in order to be enabled to find in Shakespeare's personal
observation and experience the well-springs of the plainly developing
and deepening reflections of human life in action, so evident in his
dramas when studied chronologically, a sound knowledge of contemporary
social, literary, and political history is the first essential;
possessing this, the serious student will soon realise in the likenesses
between Shakespeare's dramatic expression, and his concurrent
possibilities of observation and experience, that he portrayed life as
he himself saw and felt it, and that he used the old and hackneyed
stories and chronicles which he selected for his plots, not because he
lacked the power of dramatic construction, but in order to hide the
underlying purposes of his plays from the public censor. While no
intelligent student needs any other warrant for this belief than the
plays themselves, when chronologically co-ordinated with even an
elementary knowledge of the history of the period, we have Shakespeare's
own assertion that this was the actual method and spirit of his work.
When he tells us in _Hamlet_ that "the purpose of playing, whose end,
both at the first _and now_, was, _and is_, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own
image, and _the very age and body of the time_ his form and pressure,"
he is not attempting to describe the dramatic methods of ancient
Denmark, but is definitely expounding the functions of dramatic
exposition as they prevailed in actual use in his own day, and as he
himself had then exercised them for over ten years.

Any attempt to visualise Shakespeare in his contemporary environment,
and spiritually to link his work year by year with the life of his time,
would be impossible unless there can first be attained a far clearer
idea than now exists of his theatrical connections, the inception of his
dramatic work, and of the literary and social affiliations he formed and
antagonisms he aroused, durin