l necessity on the action
exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.

4

The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a
conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience
to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by
inspiration. And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to
allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too
technical for a lecture.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not
intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the
effects which he produced. But _no_ artist always does this, and I see
no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his
method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from
that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and
inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The
two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely
poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first
conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in
it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired'
than the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no
doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a
difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote
fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says
so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with
unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for
instance in _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_);
it is almost impossible that he can have worked out the plots of his
best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears
to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of de