players visited the town, and in 1576 when Shakespeare was twelve years of age two companies are mentioned, those of the Earls of Warwick and Worcester, and from thence to 1587 players seem constantly to have visited Stratford. Plays were then very different to the farces and pantomimes of our day, and attended by grave personages such as would go to a scientific lecture now. In fact they were considered vehicles of instruction as well as entertainment, and this Shakespeare himself glances at in Hamlet,

"I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions."

Mr. Halliwell suggests that probably Shakespeare may have joined some "travelling companies of comedians" for a strolling spree ere he devoted himself to the stage. Such an idea may possibly have struck him, and wild spirits have urged less talented men to "strut their little hour," but whether carried out by the bard does not appear, with the exception of a tradition at Leicester, that Shakespeare once performed in the Guildhall of that city. It is, however, certain that the Queen's players were in Stratford in 1587, and two years later Shakespeare was himself an humble member of the company. Here his wit, talents, and ready pen soon made him conspicuous amongst them; and that he was fit to reform and dignify the drama, an extract

D

from his own lecture on the subject in Hamlet fully shows:

"Let your discretion be your tutor, suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this, overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one, must in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others."

Such advice as this, with reference to its peculiar subject, is indeed "for all times," and as judicious now as when it was first delivered. Humanity was sometimes in Shakespeare's time "imitated abominably" as he says, and so it has been often since :-"O, reform it altogether."