of France had been brought upon the stage in
a derogatory manner. James the First himself
escaped not ridicule. In consequence of such
errors in conduct, dramatic performances in
London were entirely suspended. The company
was preserved from these mistakes while under
the administration of the judicious, prudent, and
gentle Shakespeare.

A funeral elegy on the death of Burbadge
gives some account of the part taken by him in
the representation of Shakespeare's and others'
plays. The characters recorded in these verses,
as acted by him, are Hamlet, Romeo, Henry the
Fifth, Jeronimo (in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy),
Edward, Richard the Third, Macbeth, Brutus,
Marcius, Vindex, Frankford, Brachiano,
Malevole, Philaster, Amintas,

the red-haired Jew,
Which sought the bankrupt merchant's pound of
flesh,
By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh;

Lear, Pericles, and Othello.

To return: In the last part of Henry the Sixth,
Shakespeare found the character of Richard,
Duke of Glo'ster, afterwards Richard the Third.
This character fixed the attention of
Shakespeare, and he much strengthened it in his
adaptation. He determined also to expand it in a
separate drama. But first he tried his hand on
the subject of Richard the Second, in the
composition of which he seems to have obtained
assistance, for the style is unequal, and certain
parts indicate the presence of an inferior genius.
And now Shakespeare made a great and
independent effort, and proceeded to construct his
mighty tragedy of Richard the Third, for which
he consulted Sir Thomas More's history, and
indeed accepted his conception of the character.
He derived also some of his materials from
Holinshed. The structure of this great drama
is elaborate and complex, and the diction of
the loftiest kind. In the course of the play a
succession of deaths necessarily occur. But
the catastrophe is simple. Richard falls by the
hand of Richmond, but the stage remains
unencumbered with bodies of the slain. This
work is the most ambitious which Shakespeare
had up to this period (1595) composed. We
allude, of course, to the tragedy as it stands in
Shakespeare's collected works, and not to
Cibber's version, usually substituted for it on the
boards.

Shakespeare now became interested in such
earlier portions of his country's history as were
needful to explain the proximate causes of the
events in the reigns which he had already
dramatised. To have made the series complete,
he should have commenced with the occurrences
that distinguished the busy period when Henry
the Second was king of England; but he
preferred taking it up at a little later date, when
the principle then contended for was further
advanced, and King John acted as its representative.
In constructing the tragedy that bears
his name, Shakespeare did not, as in Richard
the Third, depend on his own resources, but
resorted to an elder play, which he followed in
all important particulars, and wrote up in its
principal scenes and characters. He was careful
in it to mark the Protestant spirit of the
age, and to denounce the pretensions of the
Papacy.

The use thus made of others' materials in the
composition of the plays which he had placed
on the stage as a theatrical manager did not
escape censure in his own day. Greene, the
dramatist, has, for instance, left a depreciatory notice
of Shakespeare in his posthumous work, Groat's-
worth of Wit bought with a million of repentance.
He characterises him as "an upstart
crow, beautified in our feathers, that with his
tiger's breast wrapped in a player's hide,
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank
verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute
Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the
only Shakes-scene in a country." In this
passage Shakespeare is regarded as an actor and
manager, rather than as a poet. His claims as
the latter yet awaited full recognition. Yet in
1593 he had published his Venus and Adonis,
which ran into three editions, and in the next
year his Tarquin and Lucretia. In 1595
Spenser, too, notices him again, in his Colin
Clout's come again, in highly favourable terms:

     And there, though last not least, is Ætion;
     A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found;
     Whose muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
     Doth like himself heroically sound.

In other places, also, we find the gentleness
of Shakespeare mentioned. Nor are we without
descriptions of his person, which credit him
with an augustness of aspect, a loftiness of
forehead, a mild countenance, a sweet mouth, and
a deep look. He wore a brown beard, and had
a noble appearance. Aubrey says he was "a
handsome well-made man, very good company,
and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit."
Greene, too, who had, as we have said, maligned
him, confesses that he had "seen his demeanour
no less civil than he excellent in the quality he
professes;" adding, "divers of worship have
reported his uprightness of dealing, which
argues his honesty; and his facetious grace in
writing, that approves his wit."

These citations bring the man before us "in
his habit as he lived," prepossessing in person
and punctilious in his dress and address, as
became a man who aspired to a higher station.
His ambition was, indeed, to entitle himself to
the rank and title of a gentleman; for, about
this time, his father, at his instance, applied to
the Heralds' College for a grant of arms; and
a draft of such grant (1596) is still preserved in
the College of Arms. The grant itself was
conceded the following year.

Richard the Third and King John mark
the completion of Shakespeare's dramatic education.
He now sought diversion in lighter
compositions, such as The Merchant of Venice,
and The Midsummer Night's Dream. He
then returned to the historic drama, but in an
advanced spirit. He no longer contented
himself with the mere form of a chronicle play, but