wed on Stratford. He was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy
the house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that
she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love--an order which
produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor"--whether true or false, proves his
repute as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they
found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman,
and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dispute the
supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres that "Shakspere among the
English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented
the general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master
of the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" marks the
perfection of his developement as a dramatist in the completeness of its
stage effect, the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement,
the beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with
which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and
above all the mastery with which character and event are grouped round
the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of his art, the poet's temper is
still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter;
and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings
round us in "As You Like It."

[Sidenote: His gloom.]

But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last drama we feel
the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the
poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Though
Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot
have been written at a much later time than this there are indications
that he already felt the advance of premature age. And at this moment
the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the
political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for
power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's
idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord
Pembroke, a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court.
While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's
own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering
and unrest. In spite of the i