likely to extinguish the promise of the beginnings of English romantic
comedy.

Shakespeare.

These were the circumstances under which the greatest of dramatists
began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare's career as a
writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings from those of
his contemporaries and rivals. Before or while he was proceeding from
the re-touching and re-writing of the plays of others to original
dramatic composition, the most gifted of those whom we have termed his
predecessors had passed away. He had been decried as an actor before he
was known as an author; and after living through days of darkness for
the theatre, if not for himself, attained, before the close of the
century, to the beginnings of his prosperity and the beginnings of his
fame. But if we call him fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as
these. As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which
intensified the strength of the national character, expanded the
activities of the national mind, and were able to add their stimulus
even to such a creative power as his. He was happy in the antecedents of
the form of literature which commended itself to his choice, and in the
opportunities which it offered in so many directions for an advance to
heights yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished was
due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable like itself. His
influence upon the progress of English drama divides itself in very
unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect influence. To the
former alone reference can here be made.

Shakespeare and the national historical drama.

Already the first editors of Shakespeare's works in a collected form
recognized so marked a distinction between his plays taken from English
history and those treating other historical subjects (whether ancient or
modern) that, while they included the latter among the tragedies at
large, they grouped the former as _histories_ by themselves. These
_histories_ are in their literary genesis a development of the
_chronicle histories_ of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries,
the taste for which had greatly increased towards the beginning of his
own career as a dramatist, in accordance with the general progress of
national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it cannot be assumed
that Shakespeare composed his several dramas from English history in the
sequence of the chronology of