As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable to distinguish, in Shakespeare's earlier works, between what is his own and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a collaborator. The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best passages to Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is not so good. The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. But we can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love's Labour's Lost" a very early example of the poet's play-writing. He has not mastered blank verse: the sense usually ends with the end of each line; much of the play is written in rhymed verse of various metres: prose is comparatively little used. Some of the personages, as Biron and Longueville, are of the contemporary Court of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to contemplate seclusion from female society! The play, of which the plot seems to be Shakespeare's own,[5] is full of promise of good things to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jaquenetta into Touchstone and Audrey; the ladies are predecessors of the poet's many ladies, as Beatrice and Rosalind, who are merry when in love. We have the stock figure of the pedant schoolmaster in Holofernes, of the fantastic talker in Armado, and the songs, "On a day, Alack the day," and "When daisies pied and violets blue," prelude to all the enchantments of Shakespeare's lyrics. The play was revised and worked over in 1598 (?). "Titus Andronicus" (certainly extant in 1594) is the play which Burns and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to; it is as full of horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners of war. Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of Elizabeth, and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient Athenian and other Greek legendary histories. But neither these things nor the over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in Shakespeare's mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed at as the work of "Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (published in 1678) says that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long ago Hallam remarked that criticism might come to be as dubious as to Shakespeare's precise share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795) she has been uncertain about Homer's part in his epics. It is clear and certain that plays, when Shakespeare came to the town, were often altered and added to by others than the original authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598, assigned to Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first collected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been the last and, as the most popular, the titular _bearbeiter_, or worker-over of the drama.