endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of
expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions
apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike,
Shakespeare's style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to
be regarded as the _norm_ of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it
the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and
that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established
itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.

Influence of his method of construction.

The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction
that Shakespeare's plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the
English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations
in general, and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in
more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his
greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could
raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his
immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted
these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of
unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them
as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama--to use a term which is
perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and
irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare's public was for
_incident_--a demand which of itself necessitated a method of
construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those
modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be
ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two
actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one
by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the
progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,--a
proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive
periods of his life must be left to prove.

His characters.

Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of
the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which
expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in _characterization_--in
the drawing of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity
which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art--t