The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the poems _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_, which appeared respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself. The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of _Astrophel and Stella_. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated, difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to be mistaken, is seen in least power--_Pericles_ and _Henry VI._ Then come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its euphuism and other affectations--_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _Love’s Labour Lost_, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour--_The Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Henry IV._, _As You Like It_. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call the greater drama, _The Tempest_ and _The Winter’s Tale_, belong to the later years.
The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso, Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his power to deal with that. _Don Quixote_ is equivalent to one of the great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at all times.