In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped {100} the chronicle play, and instead began the writing of tragedies proper. He carried into this, however, the lessons learned from his experience with histories, and continued to improve. _Julius Caesar_ marks the transition from chronicle play to tragedy. The lack of close connection between the third and fourth acts and the absence of one central hero are characteristic defects of the chronicle play which the dramatist had not yet outgrown. _Hamlet_, coming next, has shaken off all the lingering relics of the older type. Of its general excellence there is no need to speak. Yet even in _Hamlet_ the action at times halts and becomes disjointed. _Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are great plays, the latter, perhaps, the greatest of all plays; but, transfigured as they are by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of tragic technique the author was learning still. At the age of forty, approximately, and a year or two after _Hamlet_, Shakespeare produced _Othello_, the most perfect, although not necessarily the greatest, of all his great tragedies. It is less profoundly reflective than _Hamlet_ and less passionately imaginative than _King Lear_ or _Macbeth_; but no other of his masterpieces shows such perfect balance of taste and judgment, or is so free from any jarring note. Hence, through the histories and tragedies taken together, we see the same growth in technical skill which we have already found in his comedies, save that it took longer here because the poet was working in a more difficult field. It would not be true to say that each play up to _Othello_ is superior to its immediate predecessor in technique, still less that it is so in absolute merit; but the general upward tendency is there. {101} +The Four Periods+.--Such was Shakespeare's development in meter, in taste, in conception of character, and in dramatic technique. In line with this development, it has been customary to divide his literary career into four periods and his plays into four corresponding groups. These groups or periods are characterized partly by their different degrees of maturity, but more by the difference in the character of the plays during these intervals.