ured me I had died in the streets." "Oh that a year were granted me
to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death, "but I must die,
of every man abhorred! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won! My
time is loosely spent--and I undone!" A year later the death of Marlowe
in a street brawl removed the only rival whose powers might have
equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty; and the twenty-three
years which elapsed between the appearance of the "Adonis" and his
death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing is more
characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity. Through the
five years which followed the publication of his early poem he seems to
have produced on an average two dramas a year. When we attempt however
to trace the growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
plays we are met in the case of many of them by an absence of certain
information as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which
enquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the
"Lucrece," must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in some form
among his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are
defined by a list given in the "Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in
1598, though the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind
would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the
time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same
approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors.
Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few
of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions
which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as
well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
the period, can only be accepted as approximations to the truth.

[Sidenote: His earlier comedies.]

The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas can be assigned
with fair probability to a period from about 1593, when Shakspere was
known as nothing more than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned
in the list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In
"Love's Labour's Lost" the young playwright, fresh from his own
Stratford, its "daisies pied and violets blue," with the gay bright
music of its country ditties still in his ears, flings himself into