Human nature is a conundrum to itself hard to crack, as it is to other people, even its friends and neighbours who eat and drink with it at table. We do not know that heaps of posthumous fame may presently cover our strange next-door neighbour. To us he is only a negligible quantity in the affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple found the man out. Even Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not appear a towering genius, but only one of themselves--a common literary hack with an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and making it tell. It was a trick they all tried to catch from him, but he just went one better than they. Shakespeare’s fellow-craftsmen were unconscious that they were entertaining an archangel unawares. Nothing he said or did outside his scribbling for the playhouse is on record. He had no trusty Boswell at his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid Tavern over a flagon of malmsey. His pals thought him a jovial fellow well met, and when he died no crumbs of biography were swept up by loving hands to keep his memory green. But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in print. The first edition is full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players’ pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word. The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the text has yet to be tidied up. *XI* *THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY*