there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year. To play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated, entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and their condition. They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular plays for them on festal days. What more natural, then, than that those who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts, should give themselves up to play-writing! As do the great, so will the small. What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do. The players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic in the matter of play-making. If a play filled the house, they did not trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who wrote it; and thus came about that "common practice" for "shifting companions" to "leave the trade of Noverint" and "busy themselves with the endeavors of art"; and hence it is that the plays of the period of which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law. [Footnote E: It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,--one or more of them,--whose _Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh_, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in _A Midsummer Night's Dream._] One reason for the regarding of Nash's sneer as especially directed against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, "whole _Hamlets_,--I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches," which has been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. But the earliest edition of "Hamlet" known was published in 1603, and even this is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of the play. That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impossibility; and Nash's allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play, (which is not certain.) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his "Hamlet."