His personages were as multifarious as have been portrayed by the whole band of Italian painters; but, as a wizard in words, he resembled the magician in mosaic, who can delineate in stone every feature of those portraits because he can discriminate and imitate shades of color more numberless than even Shakespeare's words.
It is hard to believe that the Shakespearian characters were born, like Athene from the brain of Zeus, in panoplied perfection. They grew. The play of _Troilus_ was a dozen years in growth. According to the best commentators, "Shakespeare, after having sketched out a play on the fashion of his youthful taste and skill, returned in after years to enlarge it, remodel it, and enrich it with the matured fruits of years of observation and reflection. _Love's Labor Lost_ first appeared in print with the annunciation that it was 'newly corrected and augmented,' and _Cymbeline_ was an entire _rifacimento_ of an early dramatic attempt, showing not only matured fulness of thought, but laboring intensity of compressed expression." So speaks Verplanck, and his utterance is endorsed by Richard Grant White.
Such being the facts, it is clear that Shakespeare treated his dramas as Guido did the _Cleopatra_, which he would not let leave his studio till ten years after the non-artistic world deemed that portrait fully finished. Meantime, the painter in moments of inspiration was pencilling his canvas with curious touches, each approximating nearer his ideal. So the poet sought to find out acceptable words, or what he terms "an army of good words." He poured his new wine into new bottles, and never was at rest till he had arrayed his ideas in that fitness of phrase which comes only by fits.
Had he survived fifty years longer, I suppose he would to the last have been perfecting his phrases, as we read in Dionysius of Halicarnassus that Plato up to the age of eighty-one was "combing and curling, and weaving and unweaving, his writings after a variety of fashions." Possibly, the great dramatist would at last have corrected one of his couplets as a modern commentator has done for him, so that it would stand,
Find _leaves_ on trees, _stones_ in the running brooks, Sermons in _books_, and _all_ in everything.