If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other great creators the same analysis which we are about to apply to him; if we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded, seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done," and so does it once and for ever. It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art. To begin with, he possesses the true constructive power, the first secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions--whether it surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his kings of English history--whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy--and, with the swift intuition of the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them, and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole into an absorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but "two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense selective and constructive power until he has analysed the action of _Macbeth_, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and said and thought.