It would be as absurd to say that Cummings sat down to write a poem with all the rules of impressionism before him as to say that Shakespeare sat down to write a play with all the theories of the so-called ‘university wits’ before him. These men--Lodge, Peele, Greene, Nashe, Lyly, and Marlowe--had to set themselves the deliberate task of compromising between the old popular type of play, which was very violent, disorderly and exciting, and the new blank-verse play on the classical model, which was very orderly and very dull. They had for the time being to treat the drama as a scientific problem. But when we get past Marlowe’s early work and past Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_ we find the drama no longer treated as a problem; it is already a successful convention; the London theatres are paying concerns, and Shakespeare, fortified by his long apprenticeship in these theatres, has nothing to worry about. These dramatic experimenters provided him with a legacy; but he was the natural heir to it by the right of his genius. What were conscious theories in the dramatists of the previous generation became in him native habits. We may say generally that there are no technical inventions in Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets. The nearest thing to invention in Shakespeare is his original use of other people’s inventions. The convention of the Court Fool, introduced by the wits to make a link between the old farcical play and the new classical tragedy, was no longer with Shakespeare mere comic relief, but a living, even a serious, part of the tragedy itself. Likewise with the sonnet: though pre-Elizabethan experiments with the sonnet, which little by little removed it from the Italian model, were made by Wyatt and Surrey, the Elizabethan sonnet is nevertheless called after Shakespeare, in spite of the fact that Shakespeare made no new experiments with it, that by the time it reached him it had been successfully used by all the Elizabethan small fry. Yet the sonnet theory can be proved in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian dramatic theories can be proved in his plays. An undue prominence is given to poetic theories either when people who are not real poets are encouraged by the low state of poetry to try to write it themselves: such poets must obviously depend on theories in proportion as they are wanting in genius. Or when critics without any poetic sense attempt to explain changes in poetry to themselves and to the reading public. No genuine poet or artist ever called himself after a theory or invented a name for a theory. And it was surely a critic who first pointed out the distinction between subject-matter and form, and from this began to philosophize on form; as it is surely criticism which has always stood between poetry and the plain reader, made possible the writing of so much false poetry and, by granting too much respect to theories, lost the power of distinguishing between what is false and what is true.