ome notice, we may be sure, figured in Shakespeare's diary of the
first performances of his great plays on the stage. However eminent a
man is through native genius or from place of power, he can never,
whatever his casual professions to the contrary, be indifferent to the
reception accorded by his fellow-men to the work of his hand and head.
I picture Shakespeare as the soul of modesty and gentleness in the
social relations of life, avoiding unbecoming self-advertisement, and
rating at its just value empty flattery, the mere adulation of the
lips. Gushing laudation is as little to the taste of wise men as
treacle. They cannot escape condiments of the kind, but the smaller
and less frequent the doses the more they are content. Shakespeare no
doubt had the great man's self-confidence which renders him to a large
extent independent of the opinion of his fellows. At the same time,
the knowledge that he had succeeded in stirring the reader or hearer
of his plays, the knowledge that his words had gripped their hearts
and intellects, cannot have been ungrateful to him. To desire
recognition for his work is for the artist an inevitable and a
laudable ambition. A working dramatist by the circumstance of his
calling appeals as soon as the play is written to the playgoer for a
sympathetic appreciation. Nature impelled Shakespeare to note on the
pages of his journal his impression of the sentiment with which the
fruits of his pen were welcomed in the playhouse.

But Shakespeare's journal does not exist, and we can only speculate as
to its contents.

II

We would give much to know how Shakespeare recorded in his diary the
first performance of _Hamlet_, the most fascinating of all his works.
He himself, we are credibly told, played the Ghost. We would give much
for a record of the feelings which lay on the first production of the
play beneath the breast of the silent apparition in the first scene
which twice crossed the stage and affrighted Marcellus, Horatio, and
the guards on the platform before the castle of Elsinore. No piece of
literature that ever came from human pen or brain is more closely
packed with fruit of the imaginative study of human life than is
Shakespeare's tragedy of _Hamlet_; and while the author acted the part
of the Ghost in the play's initial representation in the theatre, he
was watching the revelation of his pregnant message for the first time
to the external world. When the author in his weird role of