To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit, that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had special actors in mind when they created characters which are not star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry. II After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man plays,” Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were written “for a great company of actors”; and what is true of Shakspere holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth and variety may be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that the organization of the dramatic companies provided the great poets of a great age with ample facilities for the interpretation of many characters and many phases of life. This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have fitted other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater besides Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the measure of the foremost performer in the company and that his dramatic genius was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I do not doubt. We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes become older as Burbage himself advanced in years. Romeo being intended for a fiery young fellow and Lear being composed for a maturer man, who had become a more consummate artist. I have suggested elsewhere the possibility—to my own mind a probability—that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques into ‘As You Like It’ specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his sequence of incidents from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no character which resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with the plot; he remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own sake; and he may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’ because Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast and because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage. If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and less important characters to the capabilities of one or another of the actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright in all the long history of the stage?