Elisabethans in the theatre when anybody troubles to bring them there. But I do not deeply mourn their absence; and I think that Mr. Archer adds yet another to the tale of his great services to the theatre if he discredits the cant (it is not so common, perhaps, as it was) that cries for the good old days when these masterpieces were the common fare of the public (those days have not existed since the plays were newly written), and will see no virtue in modern work-when this is written (as Elisabethan drama also was) to suit contemporary taste, and does not seek to give itself "classical" airs.

But Shakespeare is another matter. How much another matter one has only to take a course in the minor Elisabethans to realise. Whether or no he is for all time, he will certainly-given his chance, though this is mostly denied him-fill and outlast our age as a living dramatic power. And his genius, I sometimes think, may better be measured, not by the clever things that are written about him, but by the effect created by a company of schoolboys shouting their way whole-heartedly through one of the plays. Though more than a third of it-in words. and allusions must be obscure to them, they will revel in it; and-with a little good will-so may we. The acting will be of the crudest, interpretation far too fine a term. Yet to this treatment the play will still respond, while it may be inert under the touch of the most learned professor.

But if I say that Shakespeare has suffered from his commentators, I expressly do not refer to the distinguished scholars-one could name half-a-dozenwhose painstaking and clairvoyant work upon the

texts is giving to our necessarily dim sight new spectacles to read them by, nor to any purely historical research, such as is realised for us in Sir Sidney Lee's classic (for it has already that rank), 'Life of Shakespeare.' I mean rather the aesthetic criticism which, book after book, still is lengthening the librarian's entry under the letter "S." Some of this is no doubt life-giving. One may use the term advisedly, for instance, about A. C. Bradley's. Oxford lectures. I suppose I shall not seem to compliment an eminent professor when I say that his Hamlet and Othello seemed to me like a very great actor's conception of the parts. But I can think of no higher compliment to pay. For that is what I mean by life-giving. To Professor Bradley the plays are plays and never cease to be plays. They are bodies to be animated. But he knows that when they are animated they will but move according to the body's laws. He does not expect them to turn into historical documents or problems in metaphysics. Shakespeare has left us these plays inert. He could leave them no other way-though a little proofcorrecting and a few stage directions would have saved us a deal of trouble. We can all strike a spark or two of life into them. But it needs a particular combination and a high degree of knowledge, skill or sympathy to kindle the full flame. Of such æsthetic criticism as Professor Bradley's one only wishes one had more. And one could name other names with gratitude. But it would be in the degree, I believe, that the work contains this life-giving quality. And that again belongs, I suggest, to a realisation of the drama as a living thing, of the

integrity of a play as acted in a theatre, never fully alive till then. Its larger life-for I admit it has one -is the extension of that, but never to be attained by leaving that out of account.

Much, however, of the aesthetic comment upon Shakespeare (I am dealing with printed comment, though I am aware of what could be said of certain professional performances, if they too were brought into comparison) is the very reverse of life-giving— that will be admitted. However much learning it may display, it does but deaden our appreciation of Shakespeare as a creative artist. Open a volume of the Furness Variorum Edition. Not a line but has its gloss. There are passages that command two or three pages of notes. And the majority of them are futile. This is no reflection on Furness, whose business it was to include whatever had been responsibly said upon the Shakespearean text. But if one may estimate the value and quantity of what he thought it permissible to leave out by the value of what he put in, there opens up a two-century vista of the most appalling waste of scholastic time and energy.

We must remember, of course, that in the eighteenth century, and through much of the nineteenth, the plays were for theatrical purposes amazingly maltreated, both structurally and textually. And hardly within our own time has any conscience developed in this matter of their integrity. So that when I speak of the impression I receive that many of these commentators can never have been in a theatre at all, their shades might reply that they had-but that they did not find Shakespeare there. But, whatever

the cause, the effect, from the point of view of Shakespeare's preservation as a living dramatic force, has been lamentable. For the influence of this "scholastic" method of considering him naturally came to prevail in education generally. The theatre-where Shakespeare has somehow managed to live on, even though crippled-and the study have become divorced in sympathy. It is doubtful whether the actor, in his heart, despises the scholar, or the scholar the actor, more. And yet each has need of the other. The actor often sins, no doubt, in pure ignorance of what the scholar could tell him, but he is, I think, justified in ignoring the opinion of any scholar who can advance such opinions as that "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "King Lear are unfitted for the stage. An odd sort of praise, this, to bestow on a great playwright.

I say that the scholar and actor have need of each other. And here is my main contention. Dramatic art does demand the service of pure scholarshipand, in the case of a period such as the Elisabethan, so uncertainly documented, and with the threads of its traditions so broken-of various sorts of scholarship. But drama can only be profitably considered in its full integrity. We may have, for the purposes of its service, to treat separately of its literary, its technical, its histrionic aspects. But unless, while doing so, we can still visualise the plays as completed things-living in the theatre-we shall always tend to be astray in our conclusions about them.

Now this, though a truism, is a hard saying, and harder than most people realise. And while modern scholars begin to admit the obligation, they still

stand uncertain before the difficulties of its fulfilment. It was, I think, not until he had published several volumes that Dr. Furness began to include in his Variorum accounts of notable performances, and notes upon the readings that distinguished actors have given to important passages in the plays. It stands to reason that these things may be enlightening to the student even though some of them are of merely historical interest. But such records do not take us very far. In the first place because it is difficult to describe the performance of a play. One can be accurate enough about scenery, costumes, and even grouping. But when one comes to the acting— the performance itself, that is there is little to be done but to record the impression it makes upon each of us. Not that the impressions of a cultured critic are not valuable evidence. But they are sometimes more informing as to the critic himself than the performance.

Secondly, we have no record worth calling so of any Shakespearean performance before the seventeenth century break of tradition. And we must remember that the gulf which separates us from a knowledge of the plays as Shakespeare had them performed has been still further widened by the hundred and fifty years and more of maltreatment of the text.

But, if we could have put before our eyes-our physical eye, or our mind's eye-a performance of, say, "Hamlet," as Shakespeare ordered it, it would be most informing. And apart from what one may call the external information, it might even offer us a key to the solution of many of the psychological,