pposites--all the more that this has already
been achieved by the unique master whom we prize so highly, and, often
without knowing why, extol above every one. He had, to be sure, the
advantage of living at the proper harvest-time, of expending his
activity in a Protestant country teeming with life, where the madness of
bigotry was silent for a time, so that a man like Shakespeare, imbued
with a natural piety, was left free to develop his real self religiously
without regard to any definite creed.

III

SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIST

If lovers and friends of art wish fully to enjoy a creation of any kind,
they delight in it as a whole, are permeated by the unity with which the
artist has endowed it. To a person, on the other hand, who wishes to
discuss such productions theoretically, to assert something about them,
and therefore, to inform and instruct, discrimination becomes a duty. We
believed we were fulfilling that duty in considering Shakespeare first
as a poet in general, and then comparing him with the ancient and the
most modern poets. And now we wish to complete our design by considering
him as a dramatist.

Shakespeare's name and worth belong to the history of poetry; but it is
doing an injustice to all the dramatists of earlier and later ages to
present his entire merit as belonging to the history of the theatre.

A person of universally acknowledged talent may make a doubtful use of
his endowments. Not everything produced by such a superior mind is done
in the most perfect way. Thus Shakespeare belongs essentially to the
history of poetry; in the history of the theatre he figures only
accidentally. Because we can admire him unqualifiedly in the first, we
must in the latter take into consideration the conditions to which he
submitted and not extol those conditions as either virtues or models.

We distinguish closely allied forms of poetic creation, which, however,
in a vivid treatment often merge into each other: the epic, dialogue,
drama, stage play, may be differentiated. An epic requires oral delivery
to the many by a single individual; dialogue, speech in private company,
where the multitude may, to be sure, be listeners; drama, conversation
in actions, even though perhaps presented only to the imagination; stage
play, all three together, inasmuch as it engages the sense of vision and
may be grasped under certain conditions of local and personal presence.

It is in this sense that Shakespeare's pr