of detail. It is just in this capacity that Ten Brink has shown himself especially great, and I should advise you to accept his opinion. I shall assume therefore that Shakespeare wrote only Tragedies and Comedies.

But if we were to divide his thirty-seven plays into these two classes, it is very necessary that you should know exactly what is meant by tragedy, and what is meant by comedy. Ten Brink uses these terms, just as our best English critics use them, in the classical sense only. Most people have an idea that a comedy is a play written to make people laugh-a funny play, in short; and that a tragedy is a play in which there is some killing or a good deal of grief or passion. Put into the briefest form, the popular notion is that a comedy makes you laugh, and a tragedy makes you cry. But this is all wrong, or nearly all wrong. Remember that the great and terrible poem of Dante is called, and very correctly called, the Divine Comedy. Now in the classic sense the difference between a tragedy and a comedy lies not so much in the incidents of the plays, but in the order of the incidents. A tragedy should begin with a calm and peaceful opening, or even a pleasant, merry opening is possibleand then should gradually become more sombre and terrible till the climax is reached. On the other hand, a comedy may begin even in a tragical manner; but the progress of the play must be a steady brightening of tone until a grateful conclusion is arrived at. It is not at all necessary that a comedy should make you laugh, in order to be a comedy. Some of the greatest comedies do not make us laugh at all. And now you will understand why Dante called his poem the Divine Comedy. It begins in Hell; but it ends in Heaven. The whole progress of the poem represents a brightening of conditions until the highest of all conditions is reached at the sight of the Mystical Rose.

Taking the classical meaning of the words, therefore, we can save all trouble by dividing the whole of Shakespeare's plays into tragedies and comedies. Yet the distinction

can not always be made a very sharp one. The reason is that Shakespeare's genius sometimes invented a new form of drama which it is almost impossible to class. "Measure for Measure" must be classed as a comedy; the ending of it is according to the rules of comedy. But, as has well been said, "it oversteps the bounds of comedy." There is no play more sombre and more psychologically terrible than "Measure for Measure." From first to last the nerves of the spectator or the reader are kept in a state of extreme tension, which sometimes accentuates into real pain-I may almost say agony. Few tragedies could be more tragical without bloodshed; yet we have classed the play as a comedy.

I think this is all that is necessary to say about grouping. You will see that there are no difficulties in your way according to the judgment of the best scholars. We may now turn to another subject about which an enormous amount of stuff has been written to very little purpose,-the origin of Shakespeare's plays. I believe that we can treat this topic just as simply, though not perhaps as tersely, as the question of grouping.

The first general fact which you should know is that Shakespeare did not invent any of his plays,—with perhaps one exception, the "Love's Labour's Lost." When he wanted to write a play he simply took a play that had been written before, and wrote it over again; or else he took some famous story which he had read in a book, and made a play out of it; in not a few cases, he used two or three different stories as the material for one of his own dramas. This is the general fact; and it is very significant. Only a great genius can do this. Shakespeare felt so conscious of his own power that the question of a new subject never even occurred to him. No matter how old the subject was, he could make it new; no matter how beautifully a story had been told, he could tell it infinitely better. Nearly all great genius in literature has acted in the same way. Genius does not need to invent, because it re-creates anything which it

touches. The greatest of French dramatists, Molière, did just as Shakespeare did; he took his material wherever he could find it.

In a general way, a knowledge of the sources of Shakespeare's plays is of no use to you at all, except in one particular, the sources show you, better than anything else could, the enormousness of Shakespeare's genius. For when you hear it said that such and such a poet got his inspiration from such and such a story, and look at the story, and find in it almost nothing in the least resembling the poem, then you can understand what inspiration means. It does not mean that a man borrows ideas and expressions from somebody else-literary theft, vulgar plagiarism; it means only that the ideas or expressions of somebody else have excited in the poet's mind a new and completely original train of fancies. Of course Shakespeare sometimes took a whole plot from some other dramatist, as he did in the case of Greene, without the least compunction. But the plot was for Shakespeare nothing more than the frame of a picture. We must suppose that his judgments were made something after this fashion: "I have read Chaucer's poem; it is not badly written, but it is not true to human nature. Cressida was not, could not be, what Chaucer represented her; she was quite another kind of woman,-weak, selfish, and totally immoral. Now I will show you what kind of woman she really was, and what she said." Then he wrote, we may suppose, "Troilus and Cressida," and of course the power of his creation makes us see at once that Chaucer's conception was not natural. Shakespeare must have done this in many cases. Studying the history of Anthony and Cleopatra in Plutarch, he was led to form an idea of Cleopatra probably nearer the truth than that of any historian and certainly nearer to truth than that of Chaucer or any other poet. He said to himself, "This woman was a courtezan; but she loved. She could not be vulgar, because she was a queen and a Greek, but she was certainly a courtezan. I must represent her

therefore as ruling her lover entirely by the arts of the courtezan, although at the same time sincerely devoted to him, so far as the weakness and selfishness of her nature allowed her to be. At a pinch, she would sacrifice him, or anybody else; but so long as the pinch does not come, she loves him." Such is his conception,-incomparably difficult to carry out, yet supremely well carried out. Or take another case-the story of Hamlet. It was not a new story in Shakespeare's day, but Shakespeare saw possibilities in it that nobody else had ever dreamed of. So keen was his perception here, that it was not until Goethe had studied the piece that he was really able to understand the greatness of Shakespeare's knowledge. Hamlet is a victim of circumstances, but not of the circumstances suggested by Belleforest's narrative. He is a victim of circumstance simply and solely because his character is not strong enough for the situation in which he finds himself placed. A powerful man —a man of the stamp of William the Conqueror, for example-would have mastered such a situation in a moment; but Hamlet is too scrupulous, too affectionate, too sensitive, and too weak. Therefore he lives like a man in hell until the frightful tragedy ends. In every case we may say that Shakespeare's conception of a character was different from that of any writers who had studied such a character before him. Consequently he never could feel any scruple about taking an old story for his subject. The story might be good or bad; that made no difference. It could not be bad for Shakespeare, because with his genius he could always see possibilities in a story infinitely beyond the capacity of the man who had written it. And it is because of all this that I tell you, or rather advise you, not to give yourselves any trouble about the sources of Shakespeare's plays. The important thing to do is to study one or two of the plays or as many as you can, and find out for yourselves something of the wonderful beauty in them. If a really great translation of Shakespeare's plays should ever

be made into your language, it will probably be made by university students; and I can imagine no possibility of making it, except by a perfectly natural study of the work in itself, without giving any attention to commentaries, theories, chronology, or anything of what is called Shakespeareanism.

Will it not surprise you to think that Shakespeare was able to delight the common public during the age of Elizabeth with plays which only our own great scholars perfectly understand to-day? The explanation is very simple. The audiences of that time enjoyed the plays exactly as a boy enjoys reading them now-just as very clever stories well dramatized. Questions of psychology and all that sort of thing never enter into the boy's head,—and never entered into Shakespeare's head. His art was unconscious, he never knew how wonderful his own work was; he only felt that it was true. And he was speaking not to scholars or men of science, but to thousands of people who could neither read nor write. The poorest little village in Japan has a more comfortable theatre of a temporary kind than Shakespeare's permanent theatre could have been; and the development of dramatic accessories in Japan long before the Meiji era, was incomparably greater than anything which Shakespeare could avail himself of. I told you, during our talk about religious plays, that scenery, fine dresses, or costumes, and other attractions were used in these dramas during the latter part of the Middle Ages. But those religious dramas had been supported by public subscription and by wealthy municipalities; they could afford to pay for all this. It was quite otherwise in the case of Elizabethan drama, especially in Shakespeare's day. No theatre in London could then afford scenery or fine costumes or any other attraction except, that of spirited acting and fine composition. Only rich people could even afford to watch the plays of Shakespeare under a roof. In the Globe theatre, for ex