Kyd in the exclamatory lamentations over Juliet supposed dead. I can hardly doubt that Mr. Spalding is right in stating that the line
O love, O life, not life but love in death,
and again,
O child, O child, my soul and not my child,
are parodies on Hieronimo's words in The Spanish Tragedy:
O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life! no life, but lively forms in death;
O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs.
Yet there is something inartificial in introducing such irony of literary criticism into the body of the play; and Shakespeare took a better method in his "tedious brief scene" of very tragical mirth in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and again in Æneas' tale to Dido (where he reproduces rather than parodies an earlier style), which the player recites before Hamlet. On the whole, we might place Romeo and Juliet, on grounds of internal evidence, near The Rape of Lucrece; portions may be earlier in date; certain passages of the revised version are certainly later; but I think that 1595 may serve as an approximation to a central date, and cannot be very far astray.
The basis, as Malone puts it, upon which Shakespeare built his play is the Romeus and Juliet of Arthur Brooke or Broke, of which I have given an analysis in Appendix II. Brooke's poem, which is a free rehandling in verse of
