Competent text critics, in their efforts to establish the chronological order of the dramas, have long since displayed the facts that Shakespeare's earlier original plays were largely comedies of a joyous nature, and that, as the years pass, his work becomes more serious and philosophical; in time developing into the pessimistic bitterness of _Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_, but softening and lightening, at the end of his career, in the gravely reflective but kindly mood of _Cymbeline_, _A Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_; yet no serious attempt has ever been made to trace and demonstrate in the personal contact of the writer with concurrent life the underlying spiritual causes of these very palpable changes in his expression of it. Until this is done no adequate life of Shakespeare can be written.[1]
Now, in order to be enabled to find in Shakespeare's personal observation and experience the well-springs of the plainly developing and deepening reflections of human life in action, so evident in his dramas when studied chronologically, a sound knowledge of contemporary social, literary, and political history is the first essential; possessing this, the serious student will soon realise in the likenesses between Shakespeare's dramatic expression, and his concurrent possibilities of observation and experience, that he portrayed life as he himself saw and felt it, and that he used the old and hackneyed stories and chronicles which he selected for his plots, not because he lacked the power of dramatic construction, but in order to hide the underlying purposes of his plays from the public censor. While no intelligent student needs any other warrant for this belief than the plays themselves, when chronologically co-ordinated with even an elementary knowledge of the history of the period, we have Shakespeare's own assertion that this was the actual method and spirit of his work. When he tells us in _Hamlet_ that "the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first _and now_, was, _and is_, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and _the very age and body of the time_ his form and pressure," he is not attempting to describe the dramatic methods of ancient Denmark, but is definitely expounding the functions of dramatic exposition as they prevailed in actual use in his own day, and as he himself had then exercised them for over ten years.