WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
   DRAMATIST

   Plays written while you wait

I guess I’d find plenty to do.”

“Guess again,” said Tennyson.  “My dear boy, you forget one thing. You are out of date.  People don’t go to the theatres to hear you, they go to see the people who do you.”

“That is true,” said Ward.  “And they do do you, my beloved William.  It’s a wonder to me you are not dizzy turning over in your grave the way they do you.”

“Can it be that I can ever be out of date?” asked Shakespeare.  “I know, of course, that I have to be adapted at times; but to be wholly out of date strikes me as a hard fate.”

“You’re not out of date,” interposed Carlyle; “the date is out of you.  There is a great demand for Shakespeare in these days, but there isn’t any stuff.”

“Then I should succeed,” said Shakespeare.

“No, I don’t think so,” returned Carlyle.  “You couldn’t stand the pace.  The world revolves faster to-day than it did in your time—­men write three or four plays at once.  This is what you might call a Type-writer Age, and to keep up with the procession you’d have to work as you never worked before.”

“That is true,” observed Tennyson.  “You’d have to learn to be ambidextrous, so that you could keep two type-writing machines going at once; and, to be perfectly frank with you, I cannot even conjure up in my fancy a picture of you knocking out a tragedy with the right hand on one machine, while your left hand is fashioning a farce-comedy on another.”

“He might do as a great many modern writers do,” said Ward; “go in for the Paper-doll Drama.  Cut the whole thing out with a pair of scissors.  As the poet might have said if he’d been clever enough: 

Oh, bring me the scissors, And bring me the glue, And a couple of dozen old plays. I’ll cut out and paste A drama for you That’ll run for quite sixty-two days.

Oh, bring me a dress Made of satin and lace, And a book—­say Joe Miller’s—­of wit; And I’ll make the old dramatists Blue in the face With the play that I’ll turn out for it.

So bring me the scissors, And bring me the paste, And a dozen fine old comedies; A fine line of dresses, And popular taste I’ll make a strong effort to please.

“You draw a very blue picture, it seems to me,” said Shakespeare, sadly.

“Well, it’s true,” said Carlyle.  “The world isn’t at all what it used to be in any one respect, and you fellows who made great reputations centuries ago wouldn’t have even the ghost of a show now.  I don’t believe Homer could get a poem accepted by a modern magazine, and while the comic papers are still printing Diogenes’ jokes the old gentleman couldn’t make enough out of them in these days to pay taxes on his tub, let alone earning his bread.”