art, literature, ripeness of landscape, and social life, to the young American, Italy was to the young Englishman of Shakespeare's time, and for several later generations.

Chaucer had gone to Italy for some of his most characteristic tales; Wyatt and Surrey had learned the poetic art at the hands of Italian singers; the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare were deeply touched by this searching influence, and his immediate successors, Webster and Cyril Tourneur especially, gave dramatic form to those appalling violations of the most sacred laws and relations of life which are the most perplexing aspect of the psychology of the Renaissance; and it was from Italy, where his imagination was rapidly expanding in a genial air, that the young Milton was called home when the clouds of civil strife began to darken the close of that great day of which Shakespeare was the master mind.

This home of beauty, history, art, romance, passion, and tragedy must have had immense attractiveness for Shakespeare, whose boyhood studies, earliest reading, and first apprentice work as a playwright brought him into close contact with it. Many men of Shakespeare's acquaintance had made the journey, and were constantly making it; it was a difficult but not a very expensive journey; to visit Italy must have seemed as necessary to Shakespeare, as to visit Germany has seemed necessary to the American student of philosophy and science, and to visit France and the Italy of to-day to the student of art.

Mr. Brandes bases his belief that Shakespeare made

this journey on the facts that there were, in his time, none of those guide-books and manuals of various kinds which spread a foreign country as clearly before the mind of an intelligent student at home as a map spreads it before the eye; that, at the time "The Merchant of Venice" appeared, no description of the most fascinating of cities had seen the light in England; that the familiarity with localities, names, characteristics, architecture, manners, and local customs shown in "The Merchant of Venice" and in "The Taming of the Shrew" could have been gained only by personal acquaintance with the country and the people.

On the other hand, as Mr. Brandes frankly concedes, there are mistakes in "Romeo and Juliet," in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and in "Othello" which are not easy to reconcile with first-hand knowledge of the localities described. It must be remembered, too, that the poet had immense capacity for assimilating knowledge and making it his own; that a social or moral fact was as full of suggestion to him as a bone to a naturalist; that he lived with men whose acquaintance with other countries he was constantly drawing upon to enlarge his own information; and that he had access to books which gave the freshest and most vivid descriptions of Italian scenery, cities, and manners. Many of the striking and accurate descriptions of localites to be found in literature were written by men who never set foot in the countries with which they seem to show the utmost familiarity. One of the most charming of American pastorals de

scribes, with complete accuracy of detail, as well as with the truest feeling for atmospheric effect, a landscape which the poet never saw. On a fortunate day

he brought into his library a man who knew no other country so well. He faced his visitor to the north. "You are now," he said, " standing by the blacksmith's forge and looking to the north tell me everything you see." The visitor closed his eyes and described with loving minuteness a country with which he had been intimate all his conscious life. When he had finished, he was turned successively to the west, the south, and the east, until his graphic vision had surveyed and reported the distant and beautiful world which was to furnish the background for the poem. The process and the result are incomprehensible to critics and students who are devoid of imagination, but perfectly credible to all who understand that such an imagination as Shakespeare possessed carries with it the power of seeing with the eyes not only of the living but even of the dead.

Shakespeare may have visited Italy during the winter of 1592 or the spring of 1593, when London was stricken with the plague and the theatres were closed as a precaution against the spread of the disease by contagion, but there is no direct evidence of such a visit; his name does not appear on any existing list of actors who made foreign tours. It is a fact of some significance in this connection that the actors who made professional journeys to the Continent were rarely men of importance in their profession.

CHAPTER VI

APPRENTICESHIP

PROBABLY no conditions could have promised less for the production of great works of art than those which surrounded the theatre in Shakespeare's time— conditions so unpromising that the bitter antagonism of the Puritans is easily understood. It remains true, nevertheless, that in their warfare against the theatre the Puritans were not only contending with one of the deepest of human instincts, but unconsciously and unavailingly setting themselves against the freest and deepest expression of English genius and life. The story of the growth of the drama in the Elizabethan age furnishes a striking illustration of the difficulty of discerning at any given time the main currents of spiritual energy, and of separating the richest and most masterful intellectual life from the evil conditions through which it is often compelled to work its way, and from the corrupt accessories which sometimes surround it. The growth of humanity is not the unfolding of an idea in a world of pure ideality; it is something deeper and more significant: it is an outpouring of a vast energy, constantly seeking new channels of expression and new ways of action, painfully striving to find a balance between its passionate

needs and desires and the conditions under which it is compelled to work, and painfully adjusting its inner ideals and spiritual necessities to outward realities.

It is this endeavour to give complete play to the force of personality, and to harmonize this incalculable spiritual energy with the conditions which limit and oppose free development, which gives the life of every age its supreme interest and tragic significance, and which often blinds the courageous and sincere, who are bent on immediate righteousness along a few lines of faith and practice, rather than on a full and final unfolding of the human spirit in accordance with its own needs and laws, to the richest and most fruitful movement of contemporary life. The attempt to destroy a new force or form in the manifold creative energy of the human spirit because it was at the start allied with evil conditions has often been made in entire honesty of purpose, but has been rarely successful; for the vital force denied one channel, finds another. The theatre in Shakespeare's time was a product of a very crude and coarse but very rich life; it served, not to create evil conditions, but to bring those already existing into clear light. The Puritans made the familiar mistake of striking at the expression rather than at the cause of social evils; they laid a heavy hand on a normal and inevitable activity instead of fastening upon and stripping away the demoralizing influences which gathered about it.

Shakespeare came at the last hour which could have made room for him; twenty-five years later he would have been denied expression, or his free and compre