(b) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of character:  e.g. the references in Hamlet to theatre-quarrels of the day, and the length of the player’s speech and also of Hamlet’s directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in the ‘Murder of Gonzago.’  All this was probably of great interest at the time when Hamlet was first presented; most of it we should be very sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive art?

(c) Again, we may look at Shakespeare’s soliloquies.  It will be agreed that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being addressed.  And in this respect, as in others, many of the soliloquies are master-pieces.  But certainly in some the purpose of giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience.  Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays, though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius’s speech in Cymbeline (III. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature tragedies something of this kind may be traced.  Let anyone compare, for example, Edmund’s soliloquy in King Lear, I. ii., ’This is the excellent foppery of the world,’ with Edgar’s in II. iii., and he will be conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving information is imperfectly disguised.[23]

(d) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare’s plays, if not in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and also that questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for him to answer with certainty.  For instance, some of the indications of the lapse of time between Othello’s marriage and the events of the later Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was murdered.  But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of this latter kind is not really a defect.  For instance, the difficulty about Hamlet’s age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did not exist for Shakespeare’s audience.  The moment Burbage entered it must have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty.  And in like manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)

(e) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or ’pestered with metaphors’; but they were surely right in the general statement that his language often shows these faults.  And this is a subject which later criticism has never fairly faced and examined.