When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the daughter of the great captain of industry. I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show. These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted. Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.” This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap, because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices of his time and class.