Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE IN ENGLAND UNTIL 1587 [The best popular history of English Literature is still Stopford Brooke's Primer. The best popular work on Elizabethan Literature is Saintsbury's; the best on the early drama is Addington Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors. More satisfactory than any of these, as far as it goes, is Frederick Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature. For whoever wishes more thorough treatment of the English stage, Mr. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature is useful; and Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, and Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama are very valuable.] From the facts we have just considered, it is clear that in 1587 Shakspere was still at Stratford; and that by 1592 he was already so established a dramatist as to be grouped by Robert Greene with Peele and Marlowe. In the next year, 1593, the publication of Venus and Adonis brings him finally before us as a man of letters. The fact that, in 1587, the Earl of Leicester's players, the company with which he was later associated, paid a professional visit to Stratford, has led some people to surmise that when they returned to London they took him along. Whatever the facts were, we cannot be far wrong in assuming that the state of English Literature in 1587 fairly represents what Shakspere found, just as thestate of things in 1612 fairly represents what Shaks- pere left. His literary activity, then, his productive period, we may assume to be limited to twenty-five years, the last sixteen of the reign of Elizabeth and the first nine of the reign of James I. The state of our dramatic literature during this period, and to a great degree that of English poetry, may be adequately studied, for our purposes, in works generally assigned...