INDEX 494

INTRODUCTION

In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of Shakespeare from a single point of view.  Nothing will be said of Shakespeare’s place in the history either of English literature or of the drama in general.  No attempt will be made to compare him with other writers.  I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art, the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.  Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the ‘poetry’ of the four tragedies—­the beauties of style, diction, versification—­I shall pass by in silence.  Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense, may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator.  For this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.  But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.

Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to study all the parts.  They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular moment.  This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid and intent imagination.  But this alone will hardly suffice.  It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect.  And such readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration.  They misunderstand, I believe.  They would not shrink if they remembered two things.  In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination aside and to substitute some supposed ‘cold reason’; and it is only want of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic perception difficult or irksome.  And, in the second place, these dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and are meant to be, nothing but means to an end.  When they have finished their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.