But even if Shakespeare’s plays should cease to be shown,—a thing by no means impossible, since theatrical conditions change,—they would never cease to be read. Already he has a hundred readers for one spectator. And one proof of this eternity of fame is the extent to which his language has taken possession of the English tongue. In Bartlett’s “Dictionary of Quotations” there are over one hundred and twenty pages of citations from Shakespeare, including hundreds of expressions which are in daily use and are as familiar as household words. These include not merely maxims and sentences universally current, such as “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “The course of true love never did run smooth,” “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” but detached phrases: “wise saws and modern instances,” “a woman’s reason,” “the sere, the yellow leaf,” “damnable iteration,” “sighing like a furnace,” “the funeral baked meats,” “the primrose path of dalliance,” “a bright, particular star,” “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,” “the bubble reputation,” “Richard’s himself again,” “Such stuff as dreams are made on.” There is only one other book—the English Bible—which has so wrought itself into the very tissue of our speech. This is not true of the work of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists. I cannot, at the moment, recall any words of theirs that have this stamp of universal currency except Christopher Marlowe’s “Love me little, so you love me long.” Coleridge prophesied that the works of the other Elizabethan playwrights would in time be reduced to notes on Shakespeare: i.e., they would be used simply to illustrate or explain difficult passages in Shakespeare’s text. This is an extreme statement and I cannot believe it true. For the dramas of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, and many others will never lack readers, though they will find them not among general readers, but among scholars, men of letters, and those persons, not so very few in number, who have a strong appetite for plays of all kinds. Moreover, vast as is the distance between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, historically he was one of them. The stage was his occasion, his opportunity. Without the Elizabethan theatre there would have been no Shakespeare. Let us seek to get some idea, then, of what this Elizabethan drama was, which formed the Shakespearean background and environment. Of course, in the short space at my disposal, I cannot take up individual authors, still less individual plays. I shall have to give a very general outline of the matter as a whole.