This
somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have adopted from no love
of rigid or formal system, but simply to make the method of my critical
process as clear as the design. That design is to examine by internal
evidence alone the growth and the expression of spirit and of speech, the
ebb and flow of thought and style, discernible in the successive periods
of Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of mind, the changes of tone,
the passage or progress from an old manner to a new, the reversion or
relapse from a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be traced
in the modulations of his varying verse, but can only be traced by ear
and not by finger. I have busied myself with no baseless speculations as
to the possible or probable date of the first appearance of this play or
of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that the order of succession
here adopted or suggested may not always coincide with the chronological
order of production; nor will the principle or theory by which I have
undertaken to class the successive plays of each period be affected or
impaired though it should chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to
a later stage of work should actually have been produced earlier than
others which in my lists are assigned to a subsequent date.
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