es, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar,
Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus,
Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers,
while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies were sneaks,
frauds and murderers.

Vice in velvet, gold and diamonds, suffered under the X-rays of his divine
phrases, while virtue was winged with celestial plumes, soaring away into
the heaven of peace and bliss. He was the matchless champion of stern
morality, and the interpreter of universal reason.

Shakspere was a multifarious man, and every glinting passion of his soul
found rapid and eloquent expression in words that beam and burn with
eternal light. The stream of time washes away the fabrics of other poets,
but leaves the adamantine structure of Shakspere erect and uninjured.

Being surcharged, for three hundred and forty years, with the spirit and
imagination of Shakspere, I shall tell the world about his personal and
literary life, and although some curious and unreasonable people may not
entirely believe everything I relate in this volume, I can only excuse and
pity their judgment, for they must know that the _Ideal_ is the _Real_!

The intellectual pyramids of his thought still rise out of the desert
wastes of literary scavengers and loom above the horizon of all the great
writers and philosophers that preceded his advent on the globe.

The blunt, licentious Saxon words and sentences in the first text of
Shakspere, have been ruthlessly expurgated by his editorial commentators,
adding, no doubt, to the beauty and decency of the plays, but sadly
detracting from their original strength.

Pope, Jonson, Steevens and even Malone have made so many minute, technical
changes in the Folio Plays of 1623, printed seven years after the death of
Shakspere, that their presumptive elucidation often drivels into obscurity.

Editorial critics, with the best intention, have frequently edited the
blood, bone and sinews of the original thought out of the works of the
greatest authors. While attempting to simplify the text for common, rough
readers, they mystify the matter by their egotistical explanation, and
while showing their superior research and classical learning, they
eliminate the chunk logic force of the real author.

For thirty years Shakspere studied the variegated book of London life, with
all the human oddities, and when spring and summer covered the