But when we do not allow ourselves to be caught in the meshes of these fictitious problems, of which we indicated the _proton pseudos,_ when we resolutely banish them from the mind, and read and reread Shakespeare's plays without more ado, everything remains or becomes clear again, everything, that is to say, which should (as is natural) be clear for the ends of poetry, in a poetical work. As Grillparzer remarked in his time, that very Hamlet, whom Goethe took such trouble to explain psychologically, and over whom so many hundreds of interpreters have so diligently toiled, "is understood with perfect ease by the tailor or the bootmaker sitting in the gallery, who understands the whole of the play by raising his own feelings to its level." From this derives another consequence: Shakespeare has been loudly praised for his portentous fidelity to nature and reality, but at the same time the critics, as quoted above, have placed obstacles of various sorts in the way of those who would understand him so it has been freely stated that Shakespeare is certainly a great poet, but that his method is not that of "fidelity," to nature, on the contrary, he violates "reality" at every turn, creating characters and situation, "which are not found in nature." It would be better to say simply that Shakespeare, like every poet, is neither in accordance nor in disaccordance with external reality (which for that matter is what each one of us likes to make and to imagine in his own way), for the reason that he has nothing to do with it, being intent upon the creation of his own spiritual reality. The third great misadventure that has befallen Shakespeare, after those of the moralising and psychological-objectivistic critics, is his transference, we will not call it his promotion, to the position of a _German,_ opposed to that of a _Latin_ or neo-Latin poet. It is not difficult to trace the origin of this transference, when we remember that Shakespeare was looked upon, both by his contemporaries and yet more so when rediscovered in the eighteenth century, as a spontaneous, rough, natural, popular poet, just the opposite of the cultured, mannered school, in which, however, he had shown evidence of prowess with the lesser poems and the sonnets.