than the original.  The difference between poets in these matters is no doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a difference of less and more.  It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with unusual readiness.  But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for instance in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet); it is almost impossible that he can have worked out the plots of his best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of deliberate care in some of his famous speeches.  If a ‘conscious artist’ means one who holds his work away from him, scrutinises and judges it, and, if need be, alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as he can make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such conscious art.  If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the effects he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many other poets?

But perhaps the notion of a ‘conscious artist’ in drama is that of one who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its ‘rules.’  And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was totally ignorant of the ‘rules.’  Yet this is quite incredible.  The rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle’s Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises.  He could find pretty well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney’s Defence of Poetry.  Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book (which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the lawlessness of the popular drama?  Who can doubt that at the Mermaid Shakespeare heard from Jonson’s lips much more censure of his offences against ‘art’ than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper?  And is it not most probable that those battles between the two which Fuller imagines, were waged often on the field of dramatic criticism?  If Shakespeare, then, broke some of the ‘rules,’ it was not from ignorance.  Probably he refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble himself with rules derived from forms of drama long extinct.  And it is not unlikely that he was little interested in theory as such, and more than likely that he was impatient of pedantic distinctions between ’pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited.’  But that would not prove that he never reflected on his art, or could not explain, if he cared to, what he thought would be good general rules for the drama of his own time.  He could give advice about play-acting.  Why should we suppose that he could not give advice about play-making?