When Shakspere began to write plays, the stage was well used to romance. It was the comedies of Lyly and Greene, with their beautiful and unselfish maidens, their wonders and shows, their witty dialogs and jesters, their lovers' crosses and final happiness, their Utopias and fairies, which prepared the way for Shakspere's 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' and 'Love's Labor's Lost,' and for his great series of romantic plays from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' to 'Twelfth Night.' But by 1600, both dramatists and audiences had become somewhat sophisticated and tired of romance, and the theaters turned to plays of a different fashion, to tragedies that searched the ways of crime and punishment, and to comedies that treated contemporary folly and vice with realism and satire. From the date of 'Twelfth Night,' 1601, to that of 'Cymbeline,' 1609, it is difficult to find a romantic-comedy on the London stage. There are no more marvels and magic, no charming princesses disguised as pages, no moonlit forests and terraces, no rescues and reconciliations, not much sentiment and no fun except what may be found on the seamy side of reality. Shakspere seems to have had little taste for satire and he wrote no satirical and realistic plays of the sort temporarily in fashion. But during these eight years, his comedies, like 'Measure for Measure,' have no romantic charm, and his energies are given to tragedy. He is occupied with the pomp and majesty of human hope and with the inevitable waste and failure of human achievement; but for his Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus and the rest, there were no forests of Arden and no enchanted islands. Like his associates, he seems to have forsaken romance.