1 36 Shakspeare 



the available material as by the magic of his 

 genius, bettering their best, often to convert 

 things crude and indigest into something new and 

 rare. Like Virgil, he might have sometimes said 

 ex stercore Ennii durum colligo. If that be 

 plagiarism there was no greater plagiarist in the 

 world than Shakspeare, unless it be Milton. To 

 take silent possession, conscious and unconscious, 

 of the best fruits of past thought and feeling, and 

 to fashion them into finer forms of more con- 

 centrated art, that is the natural course of evolution 

 of human genius and the destined fulfilment of 

 organic growth through it. 



No wonder, then, that he inflamed the envy 

 and malice of those who had been accustomed to 

 supply the theatres with plays. He had super- 

 seded them ; their occupation was gone ; and the 

 rare merit of his work they could not choose but 

 see, howsoever loth to own it. Before the 

 publication of Venus and Adonis, in 1593, the 

 angry jealousy of Greene, the dramatist, shortly 

 before his death in abject poverty after a life of 

 profligacy, broke out in his Groat's Worth of Wit 

 (1592) in a warning to his boon companions, 

 Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, to relinquish the 

 labour of writing for the stage — 



Is it not strange that I to whom they have been beholding 

 shall (were ye in that case I am now) be both of them at once 

 forsaken? Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow 

 beautified with our feathers that with a tiger's heart wrapped in 

 a player's hide* supposes that he is as well able to bombast 



* A tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide. — Henry VI. 



