of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from
vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental attitude. If they do not
afford evidences of a profound culture in philosophy, letters, or
science, they offer no trace of intellectual blindness or conceit, and
they leave no doubt that their author had thought greatly and freely.
Even more certain is their assurance of the range and intensity of his
emotional life. In these respects again, no one can compare his work
with that of other writers without feeling the effect of his
personality. Fletcher, perhaps next to him among the Elizabethans in a
versatile expression of a wide range of emotions, gives no sign of the
sincere, profound, and searching interest in humankind which we are sure
was Shakespeare's. Bacon, surpassing him perhaps in intellectual
curiosity and thoroughness, manifestly gives no evidence in his writings
of the warmth of sympathy, the quickness of emotional response, the fire
of passion which we find in the author of Shakespeare's plays. It is
difficult to disbelieve that their imaginative participation in the
height and breadth of human feeling was the creation of a man who united
intellectual greatness with an emotional susceptibility of extraordinary
range and delicacy, and with a sympathy, genial, wide, tolerant, but
also heartfelt, deep, and passionate. Such is the ineffaceable
impression of the man which has been shared by many generations of
readers, and which found expression two hundred and fifty years ago in
Dryden's carefully considered estimate, "The man who of all Moderns, and
perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."

What of the plays themselves? Is there any fixed and universal estimate
of their quality and significance as literature? In this volume we have
been concerned in reviewing our knowledge about them rather than in
their interpretation or evaluation. We have noted the sources from which
their plots were drawn, the conditions under which they were produced in
the playhouses, the influences at work in the contemporary drama which
determined in some measure their subjects and treatment. Starting with
the probable dates of their composition, we have traced them from the
theater to the printer, through the hands of many editors, and through
the long history of their effects on theatergoers and readers. In their
history they have played a part in the changes of taste and opinion of
three cen