ate of Father Thames in the poet's time that a royal
palace could be lapped by our great river below London Bridge.

Shakespeare's capacity for writing makes us realise that the quantity
was almost as remarkable as the worth. He wrote his plays at the rate of
two in a year, with his work as manager and actor thrown in, and his
poems as a thing apart. The quality of "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape
of Lucrece" brought him into the company of the country's great
sonneteers; he was inspired to give attention to the sonnet form and
made it one of the vehicles for the expression of his most beautiful
thoughts. The most were written about the year with which we are now
dealing, 1594. In accordance with the custom of the time, they were not
printed immediately, but were written by the poet and given to his
friends. But by this time the interest aroused by new work from
Shakespeare's pen extended throughout literary circles, and the sonnets
must have been copied and quoted extensively before they were published
by a literary pirate named Thorpe in 1609.

The dedication of these sonnets to "Mr. W. H." has roused an enormous
controversy, into which there is no need to venture far, as it lies
outside the scope of a brief biography. It should never be forgotten
that the sonnet in the days of Elizabeth was a form overladen with the
conceits of many countries, and that few men would have regarded
seriously the sentiments to which they committed themselves. Suffice it
that many of the sonnets are of a haunting loveliness that defies
praise, and gives to the best-intentioned expressions of admiration a
quality of impertinence. If for W. H. we read H. W. and forget the
prefix "Mr.," the troubles that have agitated generations of critics are
seen to evaporate. H. W. would become Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of
Southampton, to whom in the sonnets constant references occur. A pirated
edition might well have been handled either carelessly or with a view to
suggesting what could not be said openly.

Next in order of the plays we come to that exquisite fantasy "A
Midsummer Night's Dream," in which we find references to Shakespeare's
supreme patron, Queen Elizabeth, and to the pageants he had seen as a
little lad when the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth at
Kenilworth (1575). In 1595 or 1596 came "All's Well that Ends Well,"
taken from an Italian source, and "The Taming of the Shrew," with an
introduction dealing boldly with th