earlier drama to the tragedy. "Julius Cæsar" is not, it is true, dominated by a single great character, as are the later Tragedies, but it reveals a rigorous selection of incidents with reference to their dramatic value, and a masterly unfolding of their significance in the story. The drama was not misnamed; although Cæsar dies at the beginning of the dramatic movement, his spirit dominates it to the very end. At every turn he confronts the conspirators in the new order which he personified, and of which he was the organizing genius. Cassius dies with this recognition on his lips:

Cæsar, thou art revenged,

Even with the sword that kill'd thee.
And when Brutus looks on the face of the
dead Cassius, he, too, bears testimony to a
spirit which is more potent than the arms
of Octavius and Antony:

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

This new order in the Roman world, personified by Cæsar, is the shaping force of the tragedy; Octavius represents without fully understanding it, and Brutus and Cassius array themselves against it without recognizing that they are contending with the inevitable and the irresistible. At a later day, the eloquent and captivating Antony, a man of genius,. enthusiasm, and personal devotion, but without the co-ordinating power of character, flings himself against this new order in the same blank inability to recognize a new force in the world, and dies as much a victim of his lack of vision as Brutus and Cassius. Nowhere else is Shakespeare's sense of reality, his ability to give facts their full weight, more clearly revealed than in "Julius Cæsar." Brutus is one of the noblest and most consistent of Shakespearean creations; a man far above all self-seeking and capable of the loftiest pa riotism; in whose whole bearing, as in his deepest nature, virtue wears her noblest aspect. But Brutus is an idealist, with a touch of the doctrinaire; his purposes are of the highest, but the means he employs to give those purposes effect are utterly inadequate; in a lofty spirit he embarks on an enterprise doomed to failure by the very temper and pressure of the age. "Julius Cæsar" is the tragedy of the conflict between a great

nature, denied the sense of reality, with the world-spirit. Brutus is not only crushed, but recognizes that there was no other issue of his untimely endeavor.

The affinity between Hamlet and Brutus has often been pointed out. The poet was brooding over the story of the Danish prince probably before he became interested in Roman history; certainly before he wrote the Roman plays. The chief actors in both dramas were men upon whom was laid the same fatal necessity; both were idealists forced to act in great crises, when issues of appalling magnitude hung on their actions. Their circumstances were widely different, but a common doom was on both; they were driven to do that which was against their natures.

In point of style " Julius Cæsar" marks the culmination of Shakespeare's art as a dramatic writer. The ingenuity of the earlier plays ripened in a rich and pellucid flexibility; the excess of imagery gave place to a noble richness of speech; there is deep-going coherence of structure and illustration; constructive instinct has passed on into the ultimate skill which is born of complete identification of thought with speech, of passion with utterance, of action with character. The long popularity of the play was predicted by Shakespeare in the words of Cassius: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

The great impression made by "Julius Cæsar" in a field which Jonson regarded. as his own probably led to the writing of "Sejanus," which appeared two years later, and of " Catiline," which was produced in 1611. A comparison of these plays dealing with Roman history brings into clear relief the vitalizing power of Shakespeare's imagination in contrast with the conscientious and scholarly craftsmanship of Jonson. In "Sejanus" almost every incident and speech, as Mr. Knight has pointed out, is derived from ancient authorities, and the dramatist's own edition of the play was packed with references like a text-book. The characters speak with admirable correctness after the manner of their time; but they do not live. Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Portia, on the other hand, talk and act like living creatures, and the play is saturated with the spirit and enveloped in the atmosphere of Rome.

unusual learning. He was the earliest Danish writer of importance, and his Latin style evoked the admiration of so competent an authority as Erasmus, who expressed his surprise that a Dane of that age should be able to command such a "force of eloquence." The great work of this brilliant Latinist was the "Historia Danica," or "History of the Danes;" written, there is reason to believe, with Livy as a model. This history, like all other histories of that age, was largely made up of mythical and legendary tales chiefly illustrative of heroic persons and incidents. One of the most striking of these hero stories is that which relates the tragical experiences of Hamlet-in his origin probably one of those mythical figures who typified the forces of nature in the Norse mythology. The roots of great works of art are sunk deep in the soil of human life; and a creation of the magnitude of the Hamlet of Shakespeare always rests on a broad, solid foundation of prehistoric myth or legend, or semi-historic tradition. Characters of such worldwide significance and such typical experience as Hamlet and Faust are, in a sense, the children of the race, and are born in those fertile ages when the imagination plays freely and creatively upon the external world and upon the facts of human experience. In the pages of Saxo Grammaticus, Hamlet is a veritable man, caught in a network of tragical circumstances, feigning madness to protect himself from an uncle who has killed his father, seized the throne, and married Hamlet's mother, and who seeks to entrap Hamlet by many ingenious devices. A crafty old courtier plays the eavesdropper; a young girl is put forward as part of the plot against Hamlet; he is sent to England, and secret orders to put him to death are sent with him. In the end Hamlet's feigning saves him; he kills the usurper, explains his deed in an address to the people, and is made king.

This group of incidents constitute the story of Hamlet in its earliest recorded form, which was probably the survival of earlier and mythical forms. In the fifteenth century the story was widely known throughout northern Europe, where it had the currency of a popular folk-tale. About 1570 it was told in French in Belleforest's "Histoires Tragique." That

there was an English play dealing with Hamlet as early as 1589 is now generally believed. In that year Greene made an unmistakable reference to such a play; and seven years later Lodge wrote of "the wisard of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theatre, like an oysterwife, Hamlet revenge." That startling cry of the ghost appears to have made a deep impression on the imagination of the time, and was heard on the stage again and again in later plays.

This earlier English version of Hamlet has disappeared, but the probabilities point to Thomas Kyd, whose "Spanish Tragedy" was one of the most popular plays of the age, as its author; there are obvious similarities between the plays. The introduction of the ghost was in keeping with the traditions of the English stage and the temper of the time. This earlier version of the tragedy was probably a very rough study, so far as action was concerned, of Shakespeare's work; some fragments of it may have been used by the dramatist in the earlier sketches of his own version; and some remnants of it are to be found, perhaps, in a German version, which is probably a copy of a translation used in that country by English actors not much later than Shakespeare's time. It is probable that both the author of the lost version and Shakespeare read the story in Belleforest's French version.

There are very perplexing questions connected with the text of "Hamlet" as it is found in different editions; the probability is that Shakespeare worked his material over more than once, revising and, in part, recasting it. There is reason to believe also that the story found a lodgment in his imagination at an early day, and that it slowly took shape, widening in its significance with his experience, and striking deeper root in the psychology of the human spirit as his insight into life deepened. This was the history of the growth of the Faust idea in Goethe's mind. The play probably appeared in 1602. In that year the edition known as the First Quarto was published, with the announcement on the title-page that the piece had been "acted divers times in the city of London, as also in the two Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and elsewhere." Although the longest, with the single exception of "Antony and Cleopatra," of the

Shakespearean plays, and farthest removed from the ordinary interests of theater-goers, "Hamlet" has not only been critically studied and widely commented upon, but has been put upon the stage of every civilized country and has awakened an unfailing popular interest. The dramatic movement is much slower than in most of the dramas; the plot unfolds very gradually; there are a number of scenes in which the interest is almost wholly psychological; but the spell of the play has been felt as keenly by the unlearned as by the cultivated, and the story has appealed as directly to the crowds before the footlights as to students and critics. There is no higher evidence of Shakespeare's genius than this presentation of a great spiritual problem in a form so concrete and with such marvelous dis

tinctness of characterization that "Hamlet" as a great world-drama and "Hamlet" as an engrossing stage play may be seen on the same stage on the same night.

The rough sketch upon which Shakespeare worked had all the characteristics of the Elizabethan play; it was sanguinary, roisy, full of movement, action, crime; it was written for the groundlings. Upon this elemental basis, with its primary and immediate elements of human interest, Shakespeare built up a drama of the soul, which never for a moment loses touch with reality, and never for a moment loses its universal significance. In the pathetic figure of Hamlet, with his gifts of genius and personal charm, every generation has recognized the protagonist of humanity. The concentration of interest, the intensity of feeling, the hushed passion, which