Minute students of Shakespeare have done one great service at least. They have established approximately the order of his works. The plays, when placed in a chronological series, show probably the most remarkable intellectual development on record. There is, I suppose, no great writer who shows so distinctly the growth and varying direction of his poetical faculty. We watch Shakespeare from the start; beginning as a cobbler and adapter of other men's works; making a fresh start as a follower of Marlowe, and then improving upon his model in the great historical dramas. We can compare the gaiety and the ridicule of affectations in the early comedies with the more serious and penetrative portraits of life in the later works; or trace the development of his full powers in the great tragedies, and the mellower tone of the later romantic dramas. If some knowledge of Shakespeare is implied in a comparison between him and his contemporaries, there is still more significance in the comparison with himself. A century ago a critic put the Two Gentlemen of Verona at the end and the Winter's Tale at the beginning of his career. Such an inversion, we now perceive, would make the whole history of his mental development chaotic
