Shakespeare told good stories in almost all his plays. He did not invent the stories, but he selected them from the literature of the world and from other Elizabethan writers, and then enriched the narrative with every kind of beauty and significance which it would hold. On account of their excellence as narratives and their intensely human and stirring materials, the plays of Shakespeare enjoyed some measure of popularity even in their own time, if the scholars have rightly informed us; and the plays have continued to hold the stage and to interest many of the “great variety of readers” who are addressed in one of the introductions to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works. In our time the influence of the schools has insured popular acquaintance with Shakespeare as an object of serious study. On the other hand, the great increase in the quantity of prose fiction, and the fact that it is easier to read thin prose than rich poetry, have obscured for many readers the elementary delight of Shakespeare’s plays as fictitious romances. One reason that the inexperienced reader regards the reading of Shakespeare as an unusual operation of eye and brain is that we are not accustomed to read the drama of our own time; so that we have not the habit of following naked dialogue accompanied only by a few terse stage directions. Since Shakespeare’s time our literature has not been so rich in drama as in other forms. Some of our plays--those that have succeeded on the stage and those written in conventional dramatic form without regard to performance on the stage--are worth reading. But the public does not encourage the printing of them. Many of our writers shrewdly make double use of their ideas and turn them both into stage form and into prose fiction. The large number of dramatized novels and “novelized” dramas--Shakespeare himself dramatized novels--shows that in England and America we regard the playbook as something for the actor to learn and represent to us in spoken word and action. In France the latest play is for sale in the bookshops like the latest novel. If our stage is to return to high literary standards, there must grow up in our public an audience of intelligent playreaders as well as playgoers. The more intelligently we read plays, the more there will be worth reading; we can help the stage to attain and hold a better level of excellence by demanding of it that its productions shall be “literary,” that is, readable.