A Study of Shakespeare | Page 5

the first
to point them out as I am conscious of having long since discovered
and verified them without assistance or suggestion from any but
Shakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit for a
discovery which must in all likelihood have been forestalled by the
common insight of some hundred or more students in time past. The
difficulty begins with the really debatable question of subdivisions.
There are certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderland
between one period and the next, with one foot lingering and one
advanced; and these must be classed according to the dominant note of
their style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to the
earlier or the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I was
inclined to think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into
four classes; but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth
would have been so much fainter than those which mark off the first
period from the second, and the second from the third, that it seemed
on the whole a more correct and adequate arrangement to assume that
the last period might be subdivided if necessary into a first and second
stage. This somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have
adopted from no love of rigid or formal system, but simply to make the
method of my critical process as clear as the design. That design is to
examine by internal evidence alone the growth and the expression of
spirit and of speech, the ebb and flow of thought and style, discernible
in the successive periods of Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of
mind, the changes of tone, the passage or progress from an old manner
to a new, the reversion or relapse from a later to an earlier habit, which
may assuredly be traced in the modulations of his varying verse, but
can only be traced by ear and not by finger. I have busied myself with
no baseless speculations as to the possible or probable date of the first
appearance of this play or of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that

the order of succession here adopted or suggested may not always
coincide with the chronological order of production; nor will the
principle or theory by which I have undertaken to class the successive
plays of each period be affected or impaired though it should chance
that a play ranked by me as belonging to a later stage of work should
actually have been produced earlier than others which in my lists are
assigned to a subsequent date. It is not, so to speak, the literal but the
spiritual order which I have studied to observe and to indicate: the
periods which I seek to define belong not to chronology but to art. No
student need be reminded how common a thing it is to recognise in the
later work of a great artist some partial reappearance of his early tone
or manner, some passing return to his early lines of work and to habits
of style since modified or abandoned. Such work, in part at least, may
properly be said to belong rather to the earlier stage whose manner it
resumes than to the later stage at which it was actually produced, and in
which it stands out as a marked exception among the works of the same
period. A famous and a most singularly beautiful example of this
reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer of undecaying genius is the
exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera or "ballet-tragedy" of
Psyche, written in his sixty-fifth year by the august Roman hand of
Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and of song fulfilled with
all the colour and all the music that autumn could steal from spring if
October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympian masquerade of
melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is, to discern and to
define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work and progress, than
to classify under their several heads the representative plays belonging
to each period by the law of their nature, if not by the accident of their
date. There are certain dominant qualities which do on the whole
distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but the second
period from the first, the third period from the second; and it is with
these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it aesthetic or
scientific, has properly anything to do.
A new method of solution has been applied to various difficulties
which have been discovered or invented in the text by the care or the
perversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation is
easier to abuse than