ning before even a born genius can work them all in
together. Of course, these details are much easier to handle in
dramatizing some subjects than others; and we find Shakespeare
succeeding comparatively early in easy subjects and making mistakes
later in harder ones; but, on the whole, in dramatic technique as in
other things, his history is one of increasing power and judgment.

Here, again, as in his metrical development, Shakespeare was merely one
leading figure in a popular {95} movement. Through a long evolution
the English drama had just come into existence when he began to write.
There were no settled theories about this new art, no results of long
experience such as lie at the service of the modern dramatist. All men
were experimenting, and Shakespeare among the rest.

His early play of _Love's Labour's Lost_ has already been used to
illustrate lack of characterization. In technique, also, in spite of
many marks of natural brilliance, it shows the faults of the beginner.
The story in the first three acts does not move on fast enough; there
is a lack of that rapid series of connected events which we mentioned
above and which adds so much to the interest of the later plays, like
_Macbeth_. Likewise, the characters in the prose underplot (except
Costard) have too little connection with the story of the king and his
friends. In very badly constructed plays this lack of connection
sometimes goes so far that the main and under plots seem like two
separate serial stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates
from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one. This obviously
is bad, for just when the reader is most interested in one, he is
interrupted and has to lay it aside for the other. No play of
Shakespeare's errs so far as that; but the defect in _Love's Labour's
Lost_ is similar in a very modified form. Neither is this comedy as
successful as the author's later plays in preparing us for a certain
ending as the inevitable outcome and then placing that ending before
us. We are led to expect that all four love affairs must be
successful, and shall feel disappointed if the sympathetic dreams which
we have woven around that idea {96} are not satisfied. Yet the play
ends hurriedly in a way which leaves us all in doubt, and disappointed,
like guests who have been invited to a wedding and find it indefinitely
postponed. There is a wonderful amount of clever dialogue in this
comedy, but its struc