Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a ‘conscious’ artist, frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to ignorance or inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise.  Neither can there be much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one cause), as we shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects themselves.

Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas written at the present time would rightly be counted defects.  There are, for example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction which would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly well-fitted for that very different stage,—­a stage on which again some of the best-constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty.  Or take the charge of improbability.  Shakespeare certainly has improbabilities which are defects.  They are most frequent in the winding up of his comedies (and how many comedies are there in the world which end satisfactorily?).  But his improbabilities are rarely psychological, and in some of his plays there occurs one kind of improbability which is no defect, but simply a characteristic which has lost in our day much of its former attraction.  I mean that the story, in most of the comedies and many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was intended to be strange and wonderful.  These plays were tales of romance dramatised, and they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the romances appealed.  It is no defect in the Arthurian legends, or the old French romances, or many of the stories in the Decameron, that they are improbable:  it is a virtue.  To criticise them as though they were of the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all say, merely stupid.  Is it anything else to criticise in the same way Twelfth Night or As You Like It?  And so, even when the difference between comedy and tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of King Lear, so often censured, is no defect.  It is not out of character, it is only extremely unusual and strange.  But it was meant to be so; like the marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator’s daughter.

To come then to real defects, (a) one may be found in places where Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in which the dramatis personae are frequently changed; as though a novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one group of his characters to another.  This method shows itself here and there in the pure tragedies (e.g. in the last Act of Macbeth), but it appears most decidedly where the historical material was undramatic, as in the middle part of Antony and Cleopatra.  It was made possible by the absence of scenery, and doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way out of a difficulty.  But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method, and, even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.