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Rh about to be weaned, and had barely learnt to "run and waddle," with a risk of breaking her brow. The Nurse again asseverates that "since that time it is eleven years"; but this making the most of a jest seems slender evidence on behalf of the theory that the play was produced in the year 1591.

There is no decisive evidence to prove that the tragedy was written long before its presentation in 1596, when, probably, its popularity called forth a ballad (entry in Stationers' Register, August 5) on the subject of Romeo and Juliet. Yet most readers, I think, have felt that it is a play of Shakespeare's early years of authorship; the lyrical character of the play, though partly accounted for by the love-theme, the abundance of rhyme, not only in couplets, but alternate, and arranged in sextet and sonnet form, the pleasure of the writer in forced conceits, and play upon words, sometimes even in serious passages, point to an early date. When his judgment had matured Shakespeare could not have written so very ill as he sometimes does in Romeo and Juliet, but a writer of genius could at an early age, when inspired by the passion of his theme, have written as admirably as he does even in the noblest passages of the fifth Act. That he was conscious of having already attained comparative mastery in his art may be inferred from his independence of Marlowe, and the implied criticism of the style of