Othello be Venetian or Turk, _execute them as you conceive them_: the result will always be good. But remember _not to think too much about it._" The insurmountable difference that exists between the most studiously poetic theatrical representation and the original poetry of Shakespeare, is the true reason why, contrary to the general belief in Shakespeare's eminent "theatricality," Goethe considered that "he was not a poet of the theatre and did not think of the stage, which is too narrow for so vast a soul, that the visible world is too narrow for it." Coleridge too held that the plays were not intended for acting, but to be read and contemplated as poems, and added sometimes to say laughingly, that an act of Parliament should be passed to prohibit the representation of Shakespeare on the stage. Certainly, Lear and Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet, Cordelia and Desdemona are part of our souls, and so they will be in the future, more or less active, like every part of our souls, of our experiences, of our memories. Sometimes they seem inert and almost obliterated, yet they live and affect us; at others they revive and reawaken, linking themselves to our greatest and nearest spiritual interests. This latter was notably the case in the epoch that extends from the "period of genius" at the end of romanticism, from the criticism of Kant to the exhaustion of the Hegelian school. At that time, poets created Werther and Faust, as though they were the brothers of Hamlet, Charlotte and Margaret and Hermengarde, as though sisters of the Shakespearean heroines, and philosophers constructed systems, which seemed to frame the scattered thoughts of Shakespeare, reducing his differences to logical terms, and crowning them with the conclusion that he either did not seek or did not find. At that time persisted even the illusion that the spirit of Shakespeare had transferred itself from the Elizabethan world to the new world of Europe, was poetising and philosophising with the mouths of the new men and directing their sentiments and actions.