To say this is to say that Verrall, however lucid and skilful and brilliant, was a discoverer of mares’ nests. And a host of undramatic critics have skilfully exercised their lucid brilliance in discovering mares’ nests in Shakspere’s plays. Most of them are stolid Teutons, with Gervinus and Ulrici in the forefront of the procession. They analyzed the tragedies of Shakspere with the sincere conviction that he was a philosopher with a system as elaborate as those of Kant and Hegel; and they did not seem to suspect that even if a dramatist is a philosopher he is—and must be—first of all a playwright, whose invention and construction are conditioned by the theater for which he is working. Even in the greatest plays philosophy is a by-product; and the main object of the great dramatist is always to arouse and retain and reward the interest of his immediate audience. He must make his story plain to the comprehension of the average playgoer; and he must therefore provide his characters with motives which are immediately apparent and instantly plausible. Shakspere is ever anxious that his spectators shall not be misled, and he goes so far as to have his villains, Richard III and Iago, frankly inform the audience that they are villains, a confession which in real life neither of these astute scoundrels would ever have made to anybody. The playwright knows that if he loses his case before the jury, he can never move for a retrial; the verdict is without appeal. It may be doubted whether any dramatist has ever cared greatly for the opinion of posterity. Assuredly no popular playwright—and in their own day every great dramatist was a popular playwright—would have found any compensation for the failure of his play in the hope and expectation that two hundred or two thousand years later its difficulties might be explained by a Verrall, however lucid and skilful and brilliant this belated expounder might be. There are two Shaksperian mares’ nests which may be taken as typical, altho the eggs in them are not more obviously addled than in a host of others. One was discovered in ‘Macbeth,’ in the scene of Banquo’s murder. Macbeth incites two men to make way with Banquo; but when the deed is done, three murderers take part in it. Two of them are the pair we have seen receiving instructions from Macbeth. Who is the third? An undramatic critic once suggested that this third murderer is no less a person than Macbeth himself, joining his hired assassins to make sure that they do the job in workmanlike fashion. The suggester supported his suggestion by an argument in eight points, no one of which carries any weight, because we may be sure that if Shakspere had meant Macbeth to appear in person, he would have taken care to let the audience know it. He would not have left it hidden to be uncovered two and a half centuries after his death by the skilful lucidity of a brilliant undramatic critic.