tion and
some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.

Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.

This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
so, before c