royal bounty graciously added an additional 31. 6s. 8d. When, however, the company attended at any palace in the vicinity of the metropolis, and consequently lost the morning performance at their own theatre, the remuneration was doubled.

At the end of a few years Shakspeare obtained a commanding voice in the management of the theatre. As a sharer he no longer received the recompence, merely, of an actor or author for services performed, but participated, additionally, in the profits of the company. What annual income he derived from that source it is impossible to estimate with any pretensions to precision. It is alike unknown how many shares the property of the theatre was divided into, and how many shares Shakspeare was possessed of. Supposing him, however, and the supposition is more than sufficiently diffident, to have stood on a footing with Heminges, who is associated with him in James's licence, we have the authority of his partner for asserting, that "a good yearly profit** accrued to him from the concern, and his interest in it was as perfectly at his disposal by sale, gift, or bequest, as any thing else in his possession. It was in consequence, probably, of his elevation that Shakspeare ceased about

* Heminges' will,

this time to make his appearance as an actor, a profession which he followed without eminent success, and, apparently, with considerable disgust. In the list of the performers of Jonson's Sejanus, produced in 1603, the name of Shakspeare occurs for the last time as a comedian; and henceforth he may be supposed to have given his undivided attention to the management of the theatre, and the cultivation of dramatic literature, till he retired from the cares of active life.

Including those plays which he either rewrote, or so materially modified as to stamp them as his own, Shakspeare was the undoubted author of thirty-four dramas between the period of his departure from, and final return to, Stratford. Of the order in which they made their appearance little that is decisive is known; and the most ardent investigator of the subject, after a laborious search for contemporary notices of, and allusions to, Shakspeare's dramas, and for indications of time in his works themselves, has not ventured to designate the result of his labours by any other title than "An attempt to as certain the order in which the plays of Shakspeare were written," and modestly concludes, that it is probable they were composed "nearly

* Sonnets 110, 111.

in the following succession; which, though it cannot at this day be ascertained to be their true order, may yet be considered as approaching nearer to it than any which has been observed in the various editions of his works."

Some positions of this chronology rest on distinct and positive testimony, many are just ⚫ deductions from certain premises, but others are the result of conjectures so refined, on allusions so obscure and dubious, as to mock the name of evidence.

Malone's arrangement was succeeded by the belief that the order of Shakspeare's plays exhibited the gradual expansion of their author's mind. But how stands the fact? In Shakspeare's long career of authorship, the brightest period is indisputably that which commences with the composition of Hamlet in 1600, and closes with Macbeth in 1606: it was between those years that Lear and Othello were produced. Before the composition of Hamlet are found Richard II. and III., the Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, King John, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the two parts of Henry IV. and Henry V., As You Like It, and Much Ado about Nothing. And what is the merit of Shakspeare's compositions, subsequently to the Macbeth, which transcends the excellence of these? The claims of Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus,

which come under the last division, may be met by the two Richards and Henry V.: King John, an early play, is equal to Timon; the Two Gentlemen of Verona is a drama scarcely inferior to Cymbeline; and the Merchant of Venice of more merit than the Winter's Tale. Twelfth Night, written in 1607, is indeed a comedy of the highest excellence; but is Much Ado about Nothing lower in the rubrick? Nor is the Tempest, the last of Shakspeare's compositions, and admirable in its kind, without a rival in a Midsummer Night's Dream, which is among the earliest productions of his muse. The merits of Romeo and Juliet, the two parts of Henry IV., and the Taming of the Shrew, all early plays, still remain to be urged, and they surely throw a weight into the scale more than sufficient to counterbalance any exceptions that can be taken against the justice of the comparisons already made.

Many of the subjects of Shakspeare's dramas are foreign, and hence, and from the frequent knowledge he displays of classic history, mythology, and poetry, an idea has been indulged that his knowledge of languages was extensive. Ben Jonson, however, laments that his friend was master of "small Latin and less Greek." He acquired his Latin at the school at Stratford; for