SHAKESPEARE AND HIS LOVE _BY THE SAME AUTHOR._ _THE MAN SHAKESPEARE and His Tragic Life Story. Demy 8vo., 7s. 6d. net._ _THE ELDER CONKLIN and other Stories. Demy 8vo, 5s. net._ _MONTES THE MATADOR and other Stories. Demy 8vo, 5s. net._ _THE BOMB: A Novel. Crown 8vo, 6s._ _THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE._ _In the Press._ SHAKESPEARE AND HIS LOVE _A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS AND AN EPILOGUE_ BY FRANK HARRIS (_Author of “The Man Shakespeare,” “The Women of Shakespeare,” etc._). [Illustration] LONDON: FRANK PALMER, RED LION COURT, E.C. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FIRST PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1910. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. _Copyrighted in the United States of America_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTION THE National Shakespeare Memorial Committee, it is announced, is about to produce a new play by Mr. Bernard Shaw entitled “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.” Fourteen years ago, provoked by the nonsense Mr. Shaw was then writing about Shakespeare in _The Saturday Review_, I wrote some articles on Shakespeare in the same paper, in which I showed in especial that Hamlet was a good portrait of Shakespeare, for the master had unconsciously pictured Hamlet over again as Macbeth and Jaques, Angelo, Orsino, Lear, Posthumus, Prospero and other heroes. With admirable quickness Mr. Bernard Shaw proceeded to annex as much of this theory of mine as he thought important; in preface after preface to his plays, notably in the preface to “Man and Superman,” he took my discovery and used it as if it were his. For instance, he wrote:— “He (Shakespeare) must be judged by those characters into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos.” And again:— “All Shakespeare’s projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect”—and so forth and so on. In the preface to “Three Plays for Puritans” Mr. Shaw gave me a casual mention, just sufficient to afford him a fig-leaf, so to speak, of covering if the charge of plagiarism were brought against him: “His (Shakespeare’s) genuine critics,” he wrote, “from Ben Jonson to Mr. Frank Harris, have always kept as far on this side idolatry as I.”