_Second Period_ (to 1602?).--Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in Third Period?), _Taming of the Shrew_, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.; Julius Caesar, Hamlet. _Third Period_ (to 1608?).--Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure; Othello, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. _Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two Noble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._] [Footnote 26: The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would not exactly coincide with the 'Third Period' of the division given in the last note. For _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ fall in the Second Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as _Pericles_ was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be put in the Third Period--not the Fourth. The truth is that _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground (for there is no great difference here between _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_ on the one side and _Cymbeline_ and the _Tempest_ on the other), but because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with _Antony and Cleopatra_.] [Footnote 27: I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally admitted that _Timon of Athens_ also precedes the two Roman tragedies; but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in what follows.] [Footnote 28: That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,--a Roman simplicity perhaps.] [Footnote 29: It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in places re-written, some little time after its first composition.] [Footnote 30: This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case in _King Lear_ and _Timon_.] [Footnote 31: The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to _Hamlet_, especially in versification, than to _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual plays.] [Footnote 32: _The Mirror_, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness, _Variorum Hamlet_, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.] [Footnote 33: I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder (_Vorlesungen ueber Hamlet_, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's difficulties as _merely_ external.]