Although they were not written one after the other, but with an interval of about five years between them, it would be well to read them consecutively and in the order above named, which is that in which they happen to be printed in the first collected edition (1623) of Shakespeare's plays. They were written--"Hamlet" in 1600-2, "King Lear" in 1605, and "Othello" about 1610, its date being much more uncertain than that of either of the others. The thoughtful reader who, having followed the course previously marked out, now comes to the study of these tragedies, is prepared to apprehend them justly, not only in their own greatness, but in their relative position as the product of their author's mind in its perfected and disciplined maturity--as the splendid triple crown of Shakespeare's genius. No other dramatist, no other poet, has given the world anything that can for a moment be taken into consideration as equal to these tragedies; and Shakespeare himself left us nothing equal to any one of them, taken as a whole and in detail; although there are some parts of other late plays--"Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Troilus and Cressida," and "The Tempest"--which, in their grandeur of imagination and splendor of language, bear the stamp of this great period. And yet such was the merely stage-providing nature of Shakespeare's work, that even "Hamlet," produced at the very height of his reputation, is, like the Second and Third Parts of "King Henry VI.," which came from his 'prentice hand, connected in some way, we do not know exactly what, with a drama by an elder contemporary upon the same subject. There are traces in contemporary satirical literature of a "Hamlet" which had been performed as early as 1589, or possibly two years earlier. It is remarkable that in the first edition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (1603) Polonius is called Corambis, and Reynaldo, Montano; in which latter names we may safely assume that we have relics of the old play; and, although I am sure that in this edition of 1603 we have merely a mutilated and patched-up version, surreptitiously obtained, and printed in headlong haste, of the perfected play (in which opinion I differ from some English scholars, whose learning and judgment I respect, but to whom I would hold myself ready to prove, under forfeit, to their satisfaction the correctness of my view); there are also in this mutilated 1603 edition passages which not only are manifestly not what Shakespeare wrote, but not even a mutilated form of what he wrote. They are probably taken from the older play to supply the place of passages of the new play which could not be obtained in time for the hasty publication of this pirated edition of Shakespeare's tragedy. Remark, here, in this hasty and surreptitious edition, evidence of the great impression suddenly made by Shakespeare's "Hamlet." On its production it became at once so popular that a piratical publisher was at the trouble