is always--and this
is the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference, not merely between
him and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers--at
the height of the particular situation. This unique quality is uniquely
illustrated in his plays. The exact order of their composition is entirely
unknown, and the attempts which have been made to arrange it into periods,
much more to rank play after play in regular sequence, are obvious
failures, and are discredited not merely by the inadequate means--such as
counting syllables and attempting to classify the cadence of
lines--resorted to in order to effect them, but by the hopeless discrepancy
between the results of different investigators and of the same investigator
at different times. We know indeed pretty certainly that _Romeo and Juliet_
was an early play, and _Cymbeline_ a late one, with other general facts of
the same kind. We know pretty certainly that the _Henry the Sixth_ series
was based on a previous series on the same subject in which Shakespere not
improbably had a hand; that _King John_ and _The Taming of the Shrew_ had
in the same way first draughts from the same or other hands, and so forth.
But all attempts to arrange and elucidate a chronological development of
Shakespere's mind and art have been futile. Practically the Shakesperian
gifts are to be found _passim_ in the Shakesperian canon--even in the
dullest of all the plays, as a whole, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, even
in work so alien from his general practice, and so probably mixed with
other men's work, as _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_. There are rarely
elsewhere--in _The Maid's Tragedy_ of Fletcher, in _The Duchess of Malfi_
of Webster, in _The Changeling_ of Middleton--passages or even scenes which
might conceivably have been Shakespere's. But there is, with the doubtful
exception of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, no play in any other man's work which
as a whole or in very great part is Shakesperian, and there is no play
usually recognised as Shakespere's which would not seem out of place and
startling in the work of any contemporary.

This intense, or rather (for intense is not the right word) this
extraordinarily diffused character, is often supposed to be a mere fancy of
Shakespere-worshippers. It is not so. There is something, not so much in
the individual flashes of poetry, though it is there too, as in the entire
scope and management of Shakespere's plays, histories, tra