There is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. Egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or thwarted by society. Their fine energies have had no training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. Their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. They know no compromise. If they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. Romeo is not suffering in this final scene. He is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul. It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free. "O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh." How much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the play--which appears to have been a popular one--in the years 1591-97? Probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a tolerable representation of the piece. The subtler truths of Shakespeare have always been lost upon the stage. In turning over the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. The early audiences, like the popular audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. It is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. The reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. No doubt, in Shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. It is impossible that the longer plays, like King Lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from scene to scene. To make plain the course of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is true that the choruses in Shakespeare are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle to which the play is the answer. One might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's choruses. They play variations on the theme. They instruct only the instructed.