never really open to them: had they stooped they
would have picked up less than they snatched from above the people's
heads. But Handel and Shakespear were not held to their best in this
way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap
up the measure. They reviled the British Public, and never forgave it
for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid commonplaces;
but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound
magnificent by mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespear was
forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin, he did it
mutinously, calling the plays "As _You_ Like It," and "Much Ado About
Nothing." All the same, he did it so well that to this day these two
genial vulgarities are the main Shakespearian stock-in-trade of our
theatres. Later on Burbage's power and popularity as an actor enabled
Shakespear to free himself from the tyranny of the box office, and to
express himself more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue
to be spoken by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good
deal. The history of Shakespear's tragedies has thus been the history
of a long line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes
Robertson; and the man of whom we are told that "when he would have
said that Richard died, and cried A horse! A horse! he Burbage cried"
was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all
speaking of Garrick's Richard, and Kean's Othello, and Irving's
Shylock, and Forbes Robertson's Hamlet without knowing or caring how
much these had to do with Shakespear's Richard and Othello and so
forth. And the plays which were written without great and predominant
parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second
part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's Emperor or Galilean.

Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a
sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in
the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry
in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work
could reach success only when carried on the back of a very
fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that
the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the
overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact
that Shakespear d