[Footnote 25:  It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare’s plays, arranged in periods.  No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other.  For some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be one.  Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for others, the order within each period does not profess to be chronological (e.g. it is not implied that the Comedy of Errors preceded 1 Henry VI. or Titus Andronicus).  Where Shakespeare’s authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.

First Period (to 1595?).—­Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night’s Dream; 1 Henry VI., 2 Henry VI., 3 Henry VI., Richard III., Richard II.; Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet.

Second Period (to 1602?).—­Merchant of Venice, All’s Well (better in Third Period?), Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.; Julius Caesar, Hamlet.

Third Period (to 1608?).—­Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure; Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus.

Fourth Period.—­Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII.]

[Footnote 26:  The reader will observe that this ‘tragic period’ would not exactly coincide with the ‘Third Period’ of the division given in the last note.  For Julius Caesar and Hamlet fall in the Second Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as Pericles was entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be put in the Third Period—­not the Fourth.  The truth is that Julius Caesar and Hamlet are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground (for there is no great difference here between Antony and Coriolanus on the one side and Cymbeline and the Tempest on the other), but because of a difference in substance and spirit.  If a Fourth Period were admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with Antony and Cleopatra.]

[Footnote 27:  I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally admitted that Timon of Athens also precedes the two Roman tragedies; but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in what follows.]

[Footnote 28:  That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,—­a Roman simplicity perhaps.]