Notes and Essays on Shakespeare

PREFACE.

AM so often asked by pupils and friends, and also by strangers, where copies of my paper on King Lear (see below, page 242) and of certain other Shakespearean papers of mine are to be found, that it has seemed advisable to make a small collection of such things and issue them in a separate volume.

The austerest and grimmest critic will not feel more keenly than their author that they might be, and indeed ought to be, much worthier of reproduction. For many years now, Shakespeare's Works have been one of my special studies; and I have been hoping for some convenient season when I could try to put into some complete shape the results, such as they are, of those studies. But the convenient season has not yet, and perhaps may never, So it seems best to do what one may at once instead of waiting for more leisure-waiting, like Horace's rustic, for the tide of other engagements and occupations to cease flowing.

come.

Labitur et labetur."

"At ille

Certainly, no one could be more conscious of the greatness of the subject, however slight and fragmentary the articles here gathered together. I will venture to quote to

this effect from myself a paragraph which I was particularly pleased to see that that excellent scholar and most kindly and courteous gentleman Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, had, without knowing who wrote it, adopted as the motto of his valuable Memoranda on the Tragedy of Hamlet : “The fact is the subject is simply inexhaustible. The study of Shakespeare is as the study of Nature herself whose favourite son he was. And the best of Shakespeare students, if we ask him, as Charmian asked the Soothsayer, 'Is't you, sir, that know things?' will reply, the more humbly and sincerely the better he is,

'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read.'

'A little I can read'-that is all the truly competent scholar will dare to say."

To certain friends who have kindlily assisted me in correcting "proofs," and to various editors and others for the courteous way in which they received my mention of the proposal here executed, I tender my heartiest thanks.

Boeken