e constructive power, the first
secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or
complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its
moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions--whether it
surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his
kings of English history--whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or
in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy--and, with the swift intuition of
the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them,
and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he
adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole
into an absorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but
"two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense
selective and constructive power until he has analysed the action of
_Macbeth_, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into
those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and
said and thought.

But greater and rarer still than this architectural gift is the creative
power which lies in imagination. And by imagination I do not mean merely
the play of fancy in Mercutio's famous speech, nor simply the conjuring
up of pictures as in Clarence's dream, nor the invention of those
perfect similitudes which meet us everywhere. In these, it is true,
Shakespeare is consummate. But I mean that deeper and more pervasive
power, which beholds beings of the imagination as if they were flesh and
blood realities, and presents men and women of the past or of nowhere as
if they were breathing in the living present before our eyes; the
shaping power which--to make a quotation that never stales--

gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name--

so that to us Elsinore for ever means Hamlet, Verona means Juliet, and
we think of Shylock and Jessica as historical beings who veritably once
trod the Piazza and the Merceria of Venice. The great novelist who wrote
_Vanity Fair_ possessed a rare measure of this power; but in him it was
limited by the limitations of his sympathies and by his less amiable
view of men. So was it with Carlyle. In Shakespeare it is boundless. To
him all ages, all sorts and conditions of men and women, are
understandable and worthy of interest. Intuitively he knows them, walks
with them, talks with them, feels with them. They may be heroes, sages,
fools, villai