"So His, that Divine Plautus equalled, Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit, Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read By after ages, for unto his wit My selfe gave personal ayd, _I_ dictated To him when as _Sejanus_ fall he writ, And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree." [3] "If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries." XI _HAMLET: ITS ANTECEDENTS IN FICTION, HISTORY, AND DRAMA_ Many and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare's mind in the year 1601. In its early months Essex and Southampton were condemned. At exactly the same time there occurs the crisis in the relations of Pembroke and Shakespeare with the Dark Lady. Finally, in the early autumn, Shakespeare suffered a loss which he must have felt deeply. The Stratford register of burials for 1601 contains this line-- _Septemb._ 8. Mr. _Johannes Shakespeare_. He lost his father, his earliest friend and guardian, whose honour and reputation lay so near to his heart. The father probably lived with his son's family in the handsome New Place, which Shakespeare had bought four years before. He had doubtless brought up the two girls Susannah and Judith; he had doubtless sat by the death-bed of the little Hamnet. Now he was no more. All the years of his youth, spent at his father's side, revived in Shakespeare's mind, memories flocked in upon him, the fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence. In the same year _Hamlet_ began to take shape in Shakespeare's imagination. _Hamlet_ has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown. Of all Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on the largest scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are for ever busied in Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia and Africa, wherever European culture has made its way; and this one never existed, at any rate in the form in which he has become known to the world. Denmark has produced several men of note--Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans Christian Andersen--but none of them has attained a hundredth part of Hamlet's fame. The _Hamlet_ literature is comparable in extent to the literature of one of the smaller European peoples--the Slovaks, for instance. As it is interesting to follow with the eye the process by which a block of marble slowly assumes human form, so it is interesting to observe how the _Hamlet_ theme gradually acquires its Shakespearian character.