— 6—

that Shakspeare ever obtained more than six shillings and eight pence a weck for his services on the stage. In 1592 Shakspeare was well known as a writer for the stage, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Comedy of Errors have been pointed out as the plays which stand at the commencing of his drammatic career. At the foot of this summary description of the theatrical relations of«Merry Old Englandy we add the groundplot of the Fortune playhouse, built like the Globe, though somewhat larger, as it is sketched by Augustine Skottowe in note k(to his Life of Shakspeare).

Passage* 08 — b0 = Rooms or Boxes — ◻ 0‿ — 1 2 6 feet 12 ⅓ feet— 2 F 2 Rooms 2 Area or 3 * 3. 7 r( Pit 0◻ 8 8 Boxes 99 0. 43 feet Stage— +‿½ 8 — ½ ½ 00 90

We return to Shakspeare and his works.

Shakspeare's predecessors(Christopher Marlowe, Green) and contemporaries(Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Massinger, John Webster etc.) would form a very brilliant period without him, but his genius overshadows and supersedes them all. Of the numerous plays which have been ascribed to Shakspeare, thirty-seven are thought to be genuine, and eighteen of these have been printed in Shakspeare's lifetime: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour Lost. A Midsummer Night'’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, Richard the Second, First Part of Henry the Fourth, Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Richard the Third, Hamlet(in three different editions), The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry the Fifth, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry the Sixth. The tragedy of Othello was also printed separately in 1622. All these separate editions are called the old Quarto's. The other remaining eighteen plays appeared for the first time in the so-called First Folio of 1623: The Tempest, The Two