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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1913 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's sons Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II SHAKSPERE'S THEATER It was at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century that the writer of one of the chapters devoted to Shakspere in the composite 'Cambridge History of English Literature' risked a remark which must have struck with amazement every student of the dramatic art. It is, of course, quite true that all of Shakspere's plays were written to be acted; but it may be questioned whether this is much more than an accident arising from the fact that the drama was the dominant form of literature. The critic then admits that it was a happy accident -- not because it gave occasion for the revelation of Shakspere's power as a dramatist able to handle at once character and situation as only the dramatist can -- but because of the unique opportunity which this form gives of employing both the vehicles of poetry and of prose. This astounding assertion discloses a total inability to understand the special province of the drama; and it reveals a blank incapacity to perceive the lofty position which Shakspere holds as a dramatic poet. Yet it is only the reduction to the absurd of an opinion hinted at by Johnson in the eighteenth century and held by Lamb in the nineteenth. It may seem a paradox, Lamb declared, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspere are less calculated for performance ona stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them which comes not under the province of acting, and with which eye and tone and...

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