Of these the three chief periods or stages are so unmistakably indicated
by the mere text itself, and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro
in the school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being the
first to point them out as I am conscious of having long since discovered
and verified them without assistance or suggestion from any but
Shakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit for
a discovery which must in all likelihood have been forestalled by the
common insight of some hundred or more students in time past. The
difficulty begins with the really debatable question of subdivisions.
There are certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderland
between one period and the next, with one foot lingering and one
advanced; and these must be classed according to the dominant note of
their style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to the
earlier or the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I was
inclined to think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into four
classes; but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth would
have been so much fainter than those which mark off the first period from
the second, and the second from the third, that it seemed on the whole a
more correct and adequate arrangement to assume that the last period
might be subdivided if necessary into a first and second stage.
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