drous SYSTEM, we owe the desire so to understand him ourselves to the germs of thought which are scattered through the works of that philosopher; to whom the homage of future times will abundantly compensate for the partial neglect of his contemporaries. We desire to conclude this outline of the opinions of others upon the works of Shakspere, in connexion with the imperfect expression of our own sense of those opinions, with the name of CHAPTER VII. ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF SHAKSPERE'S PLAYS. THE order in which the thirty-six plays contained in the folio of 1623 are presented to the reader is contained in the following list, which forms a leaf of that edition : A CATALOGUE OF THE SEVERAL COMEDIES, HISTORIES, AND TRAGEDIES CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME. The Tempest. Comedies. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors. Much Ado about Nothing. The Taming of the Shrew. All's Well that Ends Well. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Histories. The Life and Death of King John. The Second Part of King Henry IV. The Life of King Henry V. The First Part of King Henry VI. Tragedies. Troilus and Cressida. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus. Romeo and Juliet. Timon of Athens. The Life and Death of Julius Caesar. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Tragedy of Hamlet. King Lear. Othello, the Moor of Venice. Antony and Cleopatra. Cymbeline, King of Britain." The general division here given of the plays into three classes is manifestly a discriminating and a just one. The editors were thoroughly cognizant of the dictinction which Shakspere drew between his Histories and Tragedies, as works of art. Subsequent editors have not so accurately seen this distinction; for they have inserted "Macbeth" immediately after the Comedies, and preceding "King John," as if it were a History, taking its place in the chronological order of events. It will be observed also that the original editors had a just regard to the order of events in their arrangement of the Histories, properly so called. But the order of succession in the Comedies and Tragedies must be considered an arbitrary one. Subsequent editors have introduced an order still more arbitrary; and to Malone belongs the credit of having endeavoured to place the Comedies and Tragedies in the order in which he supposed them to have been written. This arrangement took place in his posthumous edition; but, his preliminary notices to each play consisting of the various opinions of the commentators generally, the advantage of considering each with reference to the supposed epoch of its production was very imperfectly attained in that edition. We therefore resolved, previous to the commencement of our "Pictorial Edition," to establish in our own minds certain principles, which should become to us a general guide, as to the order in which we should publish the Comedies and Tragedies; still however keeping the classes separate, and not mixing them, according to their supposed dates, as Malone had done. But we did not pretend, nor even desire, to establish an exact date for the original production of each play. We attempted only to obtain a general notion of the date of their production in several groups. There would of course occur, with reference to each play, some detailed investigation, which would exhibit facts having a tendency to approximate that play to a particular year; but we knew, and we have subsequently shown, that, with very few exceptions indeed, the confident chronological orders of Malone, and Chalmers, and Drake, have been little more than guesses, sometimes ingenious and plausible, but oftener unsatisfactory and almost childish. But it appeared to us that there were certain broad principles to be kept in view, which would offer no inconsiderable assistance in forming a just estimate of the growth of the poet's powers, and of his peculiarities of thought and style at different periods of his life. It is obvious that upon some such estimate as this, however imperfect, much that is most valuable in any critical analysis of his works, and especially in any comparison with the works of his contemporaries, must in a large degree depend. The general views which we have taken differ considerably from those of our predecessors; and they do so for the most part, because we have more facts to guide us,-and especially the one fact that he was established in London, as a shareholder in the leading company of players, as early as the year 1589. We begin, therefore, by assuming that he was a writer for the stage five years at least before the period usually assigned for the commencement of his career as a dramatic poet. It may be convenient here briefly to recapitulate the reasons of this opinion which we have stated in various passages of our previous edition. We shall first present an Abstract of Malone's last Chronological Order, as a case upon which to ground our argument. |