That Shakespeare is the single dramatist in our language whom we feel we ought to read is regrettable. It sets him apart in a solitude which is as artificial in its way as the attempt of some critics to group him in a “school of playwrights.” He is solitary in greatness, quite lonely among his many contemporaries[1] in drama, but the form he used, narrative dialogue, ought to be as familiar to us as the novel. If ten people read “The Vicar of Wakefield” to one that reads “She Stoops to Conquer,” the reason is not that “The Vicar” is better work, but that the printed play looks strange to the eyes of our reading public. Plato put his philosophy in dramatic dialogue, apparently with the intention of choosing a popular and readable form. And the author of the Shakespearian drama seems to have felt that he had chosen the most popular and practical vehicle of ideas. Perhaps, if he had known to what a low condition Puritan prejudice, the social weaknesses of stage life and other causes were to bring dramatic literature, he might have turned his narrative genius into other than dramatic form. That we are not readers of plays is no special fault of this age. A hundred years ago Charles and Mary Lamb found a wide audience for their “Tales from Shakespeare.” The publisher announced in the second edition that the “Tales,” intended primarily for children, had been found “an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood.” If Shakespeare was to be retold for the young, it was fortunate that Charles Lamb was selected as the emissary from the land of poetry to those who had never made the great adventure beyond the confines of prose. Yet it is hard to believe that Lamb’s “Tales” are necessary to any but lovers of Lamb. There is a danger that the young reader, for whom he designed the book as a door to Shakespeare, will linger in the vestibule, content with the genuine riches that are there, and will not go on to the greater riches of Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare told the stories better than another can tell them, and anyone who knows enough of the English language to read Lamb’s “Tales” will find Shakespeare’s plays intelligible to read, just as when performed on the stage they are intelligible to the people in the gallery, even to those in the boxes. Repeated readings with some reference to simple explanatory notes will make the deep meanings and fine beauties ever more and more clear. The plays which a beginner should read are, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “Richard III,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth.” The other plays and the poems may, for various reasons, be reserved for the time when one no longer needs advice about reading.