But for Shakespeare’s scanty use of this method there may have been a deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason.  The method suits a plot based on intrigue.  It may produce intense suspense.  It may stir most powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear.  And it throws into relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem caught in the net of fate.  But it is apt to be less favourable to the exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through their agony and waste towards good.  Now, it seems clear from his tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class of effects.  I do not ask here whether Othello fails to produce, in the same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare’s preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.

4

The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here, and I will not pursue the subject further.  But its discussion suggests a question which will have occurred to some of my hearers.  They may have asked themselves whether I have not used the words ‘art’ and ‘device’ and ‘expedient’ and ‘method’ too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by inspiration.  And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too technical for a lecture.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.  But no artist always does this, and I see no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from that of the most ‘conscious’ of artists.  The antithesis of art and inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.  Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship.  The two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely poetic result is being produced they cannot be so.  The glow of a first conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may ‘come’ to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image.  Verse may be easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more ‘inspired’