VE'S LABOUR LOST--that the truly effective
culture is that of life in the world rather than that of secluded
study--perhaps expresses a process of inward and other debate in which
the wish has become father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous
collegians like Greene for presuming, actor as he was, to write dramas,
he must have asked himself whether there was not something to be gained
from such schooling as theirs.[145] But then he certainly made more than
was needed to keep the Stratford household going; and the clear shallow
flood of VENUS AND ADONIS and the RAPE OF LUCRECE stands for ever to
show how far from tragic consciousness was the young husband and father
when close upon thirty years old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet
died at Stratford; and there is nothing to show, says Mr. Fleay,[146]
that Shakspere had ever been there in the interval between his departure
in 1587 and the child's funeral.

But already, it may be, some vital experience had come. Whatever view we
take of the drama of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's
remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of
faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and
impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to
add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too,
he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training
involved in his craft of acting--a culture involving a good deal of
contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as
then translated, and a psychological training of great though little
recognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the
practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of
manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing the
faculties at once of sympathy and expression. In this respect Shakspere
stood apart from his rivals, with their merely literary training. And in
point of fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening
sense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently
idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness of
much of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things,
the man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must
have been intensely appreciative of the charm of sex; and it is on that
side that we are to look for his first contacts with the deeper forces
o