written something disrespectful about the Scotch, was in danger of having his right hand chopped off, according to the fashion of those days, by the Scottish king, James I. (of England). Nothing came of it, however, and his mother cheered him by showing him some poison she had prepared for him in case the sentence had been carried out.

Jonson wrote both comedies and tragedies, beginning with the first. "Every Man in his Humor" contains characters-Captain Bobadil, for instance-which are used as types to this day. It is interesting to find the name of William Shakespeare cast as an actor in the first performance of this comedy. "The Alchemist" has the character of Sir Epicure Mammon, whose peculiarities are indicated in his name. Only two other comedies are reckoned as first-rate, "Volpone, or the Fox," and "The Silent Woman." His tragedies are "Catiline" and "Sejanus"-dark, cruel, and terrible as the periods of Roman history in which the scenes are respectively laid.

For many years Jonson lived a chequered life. He was made poet-laureate the first of an unbroken series which has continued down to the present time-and received a pension; but he could not keep out of quarrels, and had a miserable controversy with some of his brother dramatists which embittered his life and kept him always in an illhumor. During his easy years he composed many court masques a kind of spectacular play much in request by the rich and great, and well paid for. These were the rollicking years when much time was spent at the "Mermaid"; a favorite tavern frequented by the wits of the day, at which met the "Mermaid Club" (said to have been founded by Sir Walter Raleigh), where Shakespeare, too, was among the guests.

The closing years of Jonson's life were very dreary ones. Always in debt (for, like many of his brother poets, he had little self-denial), tormented by painful illness, and yet still

obliged to work in order to support himself, he toiled on after his pen had lost its vigor and his works were no longer welcomed. Still he had good friends who did what could be done to cheer his declining days. He survived his friend Shakespeare more than twenty years.

Jonson was, like all the best dramatists, a poet as well as a play-writer. Some exquisite songs are scattered through his plays, and at the time of his death he was engaged on a pastoral play called "The Sad Shepherd," which shows that the poetic faculty had not deserted him, though he could no longer write plays which pleased the public. His prose criticisms are forcible and expressed in good English. There is reason to believe that all the great play-writers of Shakespeare's day were familiarly acquainted with each other; but at that time there were no "interviewers," nor was it thought decorous-perhaps not interesting-to report private conversations and convivial gatherings. A single glimpse of the social life of the age reaches us through Thomas Fuller (of whose own writings we shall hear later), and who wrote thus in 1662, forty-six years after the death of Shakespeare and twenty-five after that of Jonson. He is speaking of Shakespeare:

war.

Many were the wit combats between him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-ofMaster Johnson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.

Such a word-picture as this is worth volumes of conjecture.

After Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the next place is generally conceded to Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), and John Fletcher (1579-1625), two dramatists who wrote together and formed the first recorded literary partnership. Fletcher outlived his co-laborer, and wrote many plays

alone, both after Beaumont's death and during the time of their joint production; but the idea of such a friendship is so pleasant to dwell upon that the first thought of either brings up the name of the other. Their works, like those of all the playwrights of the time, were very unequal; they contain passages of beautiful poetry intermixed with much that is tame and flat; and their characters, beside being grossly immoral, are untrue to nature. The style, also, is more artificial than that of either Shakespeare or Jonson. Of their joint works the most original is "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," the first English burlesque, intended as a travesty of the high-flown romances of the period, as the "Don Quixote" of Cervantes ridiculed them as they existed in Spanish literature. Of their serious. works, the most important is "The Two Noble Kinsmen." Among Fletcher's individual plays, "The Faithful Shepherdess" may be especially mentioned.

Some beautiful songs are given as the joint work of the companion poets, though they were probably the work of Fletcher alone. As an example, see the "Song to Melancholy," beginning "Hence, all ye vain delights," and closing with the oft-quoted line:

Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

Of the remaining dramatists of this rich and full period, we can give little more than the names. Philip Massinger wrote many plays, of which one, "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," is played to this day. John Webster excelled in representing the horrible, in such plays as "The Duchess of Malfi." A long list of contemporary writers follows, the chief of whom are Middleton, Dekker, Marston, Ford, Chapman (the translator of Homer), and Shirley. The last named, although only seven years old at the time of Queen Elizabeth's death, is reckoned among the Elizabethan poets.

He has not the force and originality of the earlier

ones, but possesses more refinement. Better known than his dramas is his beautiful poem beginning:

The glories of our earth and state

Are shadows, not substantial things.

Shirley espoused the king's part in the great civil war, and afterward, when his dramas failed to support him, philosophically took up school-teaching for a living. The Restoration did not mend his fortune. His home was burned in the great fire of London (1666), and soon afterward his wife and he died on the same day. And so ended the Elizabethan dramatists.

CHAPTER XV.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

HERE has probably never been another man about whom so much has been thought, written, and said, of whom we really know so little as we do of Shakespeare. To the people of his own time he was not the great man he appears to us; he was simply first an inferior actor, then one of the proprietors of one of the theatres in London, then the writer of dramas, more or less popular, and of a few poems. No one, therefore, thought it worth while to collect and treasure up anecdotes about him, or to make out a connected story of his life. It was reserved for later ages to discover his vast knowledge of human nature, his wide sympathies, his artistic skill, his wonderful power of depicting character; and also as we can not help suspecting, to find sometimes in his works a meaning of which the poet was himself unconscious. He often wrote, no doubt, "better than he knew," and we have the benefit of it.

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon,

in Warwickshire, in April, 1564. The exact day is not known; but as his baptism is recorded as taking place on the 26th, it has been found convenient to assume that he was born on April 23d, St. George's Day, which was also the day of his death. His father, John Shakespeare, is variously stated to have been a butcher, a wool-comber, and a glover. Perhaps he was all three, as the occupations might have been easily combined. The maiden name of Mistress Shakespeare was Mary Arden. She came of what is called in England "a good family," meaning one which could trace back its descent through several generations. We know nothing further about her, but as it is generally acknowledged that sons inherit the brains of their mothers, we are disposed to think well of Mary Arden.

Of Shakespeare's education, we know little except from the indications afforded in his writings that he was a man of wide reading. He was undoubtedly taught at the grammar school in Stratford; one of those foundations or restorations of Edward VI. to which the England of that century was so deeply indebted. Ben Jonson says of him that he had "small Latin and less Greek," but Jonson was rather proud of his own scholarship and probably had a higher standard than was generally accepted in that age. Of Greek, Shakespeare may well have been ignorant; but Latin, taught at every grammar school (often at the expense of English), must almost necessarily have been among his pursuits. His father, who had been made a prosperous man by his marriage with Mary Arden, became deeply entangled in debt when William was about fourteen years old, and this occasioned his removal from school at an earlier age than that at which the sons of well-to-do persons usually left it. Where or how the son picked up the great writings, we do not

variety of knowledge shown in his

know; but it is probable that, like most geniuses, he occupied himself with many topics. His great acquaintance