THE humanistic school of English drama was firmly established by a group of university students, headed by the fa mous Marlowe. Very suddenly after the apparition of this group comes forward the most colossal figure in English literature, and perhaps in all modern literature. This was not a student. He was not even a well educated man; he did not belong to the higher classes. He was a professional actor, which means that he had embraced a calling which in that time, and for many generations after, was considered ignoble. Yet this man did what no one else in any other country, since the highest period of Greek civilisation, had ever been able to do; and in more ways than one he probably surpassed the Greeks. So immensely superior to his age was this genius that as a genius he could not obtain recognition for hundreds of years after his death. It has well been said that no man can understand Shakespeare until he becomes old; and the English nation could not understand Shakespeare until it became old. In the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries Shakespeare was read and enjoyed only as schoolboys of twelve or fourteen years old now read and enjoy him-that is to say, he was read for the story only, without any suspicion of what an intellectual giant had appeared in the world. Nevertheless the sixteenth century was a great intellectual age, and it understood much more of Shakespeare than later generations proved themselves able to do. In the most degenerate period of English Literature, the period of the Restoration, Shakespeare was so little understood that people imagined they could improve his plays by rewriting them! No greater proof of intellectual degeneracy could have been given. To-day the position of Shakespeare is that of the greatest figure.in all human literature. He has been translated into nearly every civilised language; his plays are acted constantly upon all the stages of Europe; he has been commented upon and studied by the greatest scholars of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia; and the volume of literature produced about him has become so great that no man could hope to read it all in a lifetime. Not thousands but tens of thousands of books have been written about his characters, about the meaning of his plays, about the relation of his life to his art, about his subjectivity, about his objectivity, about the chronology of his dramas, about the source of his inspiration, about his verse-endings, about everything imaginable in connection with his work. Shakespeare has become much more than a classic, a worldclassic; he is a science. To become a "Shakespearean scholar" in these days is to obtain a very great distinction in the world of letters; and nevertheless one of the greatest of scholars declared only two years ago, when invited to deliver a few lectures upon Shakespeare, that he approached the subject with fear and trembling, because it was too large for him. And like all large subjects, the subject of Shakespeare has its danger. Hundreds of persons pass their whole lives in studying Shakespeare, in theorising about Shakespeare, in illustrating Shakespeare. Some persons have even become insane through the study of Shakespeare. And the overshadowing intellect that has produced these extraordinary effects-effects which continually increase and multiply instead of diminishing with time-was enclosed in the skull of a poor uneducated actor, who began life under the most unfavourable and unhappy conditions. The first thing which I should like to be able to impress upon the mind of the student is that Shakespeare must be regarded, not as a common man or author, but as a phenomenon, as something in literature corresponding to the more modern phenomenon of Napoleon as a political, mili |