, and what changes in his style and in his views of life they
indicate.

In the first ten years of the seventeenth century, between his
thirty-seventh and forty-seventh year, he produced "Hamlet," "Measure
for Measure," his part of "Pericles," "All's Well that Ends Well," "King
Lear," "Macbeth," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Troilus and
Cressida," "Cymbeline," "Coriolanus," and "Othello." These, with other
works, were the fruit of his mind in its full maturity and vigor. Think
of it a moment! what a period it was! As my eye lights upon the back of
the eleventh volume of my own edition and the eighth of the Cambridge
edition, and I read "HAMLET, KING LEAR, OTHELLO," I am moved with a
sense of admiration and wonder which, if I allow it to continue, becomes
almost oppressive; and I also take pleasure in the result of a
convenience of arrangement that brought into one volume these three
marvellous works--the three greatest productions of man's imagination,
each wholly unlike the others in spirit and in motive.

Although they were not written one after the other, but with an interval
of about five years between them, it would be well to read them
consecutively and in the order above named, which is that in which they
happen to be printed in the first collected edition (1623) of
Shakespeare's plays. They were written--"Hamlet" in 1600-2, "King Lear"
in 1605, and "Othello" about 1610, its date being much more uncertain
than that of either of the others. The thoughtful reader who, having
followed the course previously marked out, now comes to the study of
these tragedies, is prepared to apprehend them justly, not only in their
own greatness, but in their relative position as the product of their
author's mind in its perfected and disciplined maturity--as the splendid
triple crown of Shakespeare's genius. No other dramatist, no other poet,
has given the world anything that can for a moment be taken into
consideration as equal to these tragedies; and Shakespeare himself left
us nothing equal to any one of them, taken as a whole and in detail;
although there are some parts of other late plays--"Macbeth," "Antony
and Cleopatra," "Troilus and Cressida," and "The Tempest"--which, in
their grandeur of imagination and splendor of language, bear the stamp
of this great period.

And yet such was the merely stage-providing nature of Shakespeare's
work, that even "Hamlet," produced at the very height of his reputation,
is, l