For instance, it is indisputable that "Love's
Labour's Lost," "The Comedy of Errors," "Romeo and Juliet," and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream" are amongst Shakspere's earliest works; that
the tragedies of "Julius Caesar," "Hamlet," "Othello," "Macbeth," and
"Lear" are the productions of his middle life, between 1600 and 1606;
and that "A Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest" are amongst the latest
plays which he wrote.[1] Here we have everything that is required to
prove the question in hand. At the commencement and at the end of his
writings--when a youth fresh from the influence of his country nurture
and education, and when a mature man, settling down into the old life
again after a long and victorious struggle with the world, with his
accumulated store of experience--we find plays which are perfectly
saturated with fairy-lore: "The Dream" and "The Tempest." These are the
poles of Shakspere's thought in this respect; and in the centre,
imbedded as it were between two layers of material that do not bear any
distinctive stamp of their own, but appear rather as a medium for
uniting the diverse strata, lie the great tragedies, produced while he
was in the very rush and swirl of town life, and reflecting accurately,
as we have seen, many of the doubts and speculations that were agitating
the minds of men who were ardently searching out truth. It is worth
noting too, in passing, that directly Shakspere steps out of his beaten
path to depict, in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the happy country life
and manners of his day, he at the same time returns to fairyland again,
and brings out the Windsor children trooping to pinch and plague the
town-bred, tainted Falstaff.
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