A Study of Shakespeare | Page 4

are
Coleridge and Blake; from the sunrise to the sunset of their working
day we can trace no demonstrable increase and no visible diminution of
the divine capacities or the inborn defects of either man's genius; but
not of such, as a rule, are the greatest among artists of any sort.
Another rock on which modern steersmen of a more skilful hand than
these are yet liable to run through too much confidence is the love of
their own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret history of a
particular play or passage. To err on this side requires more thought,
more learning, and more ingenuity than we need think to find in a
whole tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but the outcome of
these good gifts, if strained or perverted to capricious use, may prove
no less barren of profit than the labours of a pedant on the letter of the
text. It is a tempting exercise of intelligence for a dexterous and
keen-witted scholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid fancy to
the detection or the interpretation of some new or obscure point in a
great man's life or work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime to
give the reins to a learned fancy, and let loose conjecture on the trail of
any dubious crotchet or the scent of any supposed allusion that may
spring up in the way of its confident and eager quest. To start a new
solution of some crucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of
concealed significance in a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued,
is to a critic of this higher class a delight as keen as that of scientific
discovery to students of another sort: the pity is that he can bring no
such certain or immediate test to verify the value of his discovery as

lies ready to the hand of the man of science. Whether he have lit upon a
windfall or a mare's nest can be decided by no direct proof, but only by
time and the general acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot
often be reasonably expected for theories which can appeal for support
or confirmation to no positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy and
shifting probability. What personal or political allusions may lurk under
the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should consequently
forbear to hang upon a hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind
any serious opinion which might gravely affect our estimate of his
work or his position in regard to other men, with whom some public or
private interest may possibly have brought him into contact or
collision.
* * * * *
The aim of the present study is simply to set down what the writer
believes to be certain demonstrable truths as to the progress and
development of style, the outer and the inner changes of manner as of
matter, of method as of design, which may be discerned in the work of
Shakespeare. The principle here adopted and the views here put
forward have not been suddenly discovered or lightly taken up out of
any desire to make a show of theoretical ingenuity. For years past I
have held and maintained, in private discussion with friends and
fellow-students, the opinions which I now submit to more public
judgment. How far they may coincide with those advanced by others I
cannot say, and have not been careful to inquire. The mere fact of
coincidence or of dissent on such a question is of less importance than
the principle accepted by either student as the groundwork of his theory,
the mainstay of his opinion. It is no part of my project or my hope to
establish the actual date of any among the various plays, or to
determine point by point the lineal order of their succession. I have
examined no table or catalogue of recent or of earlier date, from the
time of Malone onwards, with a view to confute by my reasoning the
conclusions of another, or by the assistance of his theories to
corroborate my own. It is impossible to fix or decide by inner or outer
evidence the precise order of production, much less of composition,
which critics of the present or the past may have set their wits to verify

in vain; but it is quite possible to show that the work of Shakespeare is
naturally divisible into classes which may serve us to distinguish and
determine as by landmarks the several stages or periods of his mind and
art.
Of these the three chief periods or stages are so unmistakably indicated
by the mere text itself, and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro in
the school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being