The puppet presentation would, however, do much more than this. It would clarify, simplify, attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is, of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living, bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact, realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in their imagination. There is the notorious instance of Charles Lamb, with his objection to seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies acted. He complained that the gay and witty Richard III. was inevitably materialized and vulgarized by the actor. Lamb, as we all know, was capricious, and indeed made a virtue of caprice, but what do you say to so serious and weighty a critic as Professor Raleigh? Talking about the Shakespearean boy-actors of women, he commits himself to this:—“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare has not suffered more than he has gained by the genius of later-day actresses, who bring into the plays a realism and a robust emotion which sometimes obscure the sheer poetic value of the author’s conception. The boys were no doubt very highly trained, and amenable to instruction; so that the parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which served as a transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own talent and passions by those who are its ministers. With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic drama died in England, and it has had no second life.” A little “steep,” is it not? Logically it is an objection to all acting of poetic drama. Boy-players of girls are only a half-way house. The transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos would be still more transparent if it were merely the medium of the printed page. Now this much is certain. Shakespeare conceived his plays, whatever poetry or wit or pathos he put into them, in terms of men and women (not boy-women). The ideal performance of Shakespeare would be by the men and women who grew in Shakespeare’s imagination. But they, unfortunately, do not exist in flesh and blood, but only in that imagination, and, to bring them on the stage, you have to employ ready-made men and women, who at the very best can only be rough approximations to the imaginary figures. In this sense it is not a paradox but a simple commonplace to say that no one has ever seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage, or ever will see. And the greater the “genius” of the actor, the more potent his personality—though he will be the darling of the majority, thirsting for realism, the immediate sense of life—the more will he get between the poet and imaginative students like Lamb and Professor Raleigh, who want their poetry inviolate.