On the face of it the plays of Shakespeare read extravagantly well but, on the modern stage, play extravagantly badly. I have never in my life been more bored and appalled than at having to sit through an uncut performance of _Hamlet_, given by the most noted performers in the world in front of a gigantic real castle. It was terrifying and it lasted from nine at night till four in the morning. There was the real castle, the real moon, real armour dating back to Shakespeare’s days, real banners of the epoch; real soldiers played the troops of Fortinbras--and to add a touch of reality of another sort, in the middle of the performance real Communist groundlings demonstrated for Saccho and Vanzetti! But the point was that, with the real castle, pump and the rest, all Shakespeare’s descriptions became intolerable pleonasms and gave singular unreality to the characters that uttered them. For normal humanity does not talk of patines of bright gold when considering the night skies: it says “Look at the stars,” and possibly adds: “Aren’t they jolly?” The stars in fact do the rest: and in this given case the castle of Avignon, the Rhone, and the moon were admirably prepared to replace all that anyone’s descriptions could do. On the other hand, I have never in my life been so overwhelmed as by a ranted performance given by capable actors in modern dress in a rather bare modern studio that had galleries round it--a condition pretty well reproducing that of the Shakespearean stage. Hero and heroine and subordinate characters bellowed rhetorical periods, floods of bombast; they threw their arms about, raved, fell down, and staggered to their feet. The effect, as I have said, was overwhelming; no such other utter tragedy has ever presented itself to the world for three hundred years; the grief of the heroine was so insufferable that you could not sit in your place; when the hero died you groaned aloud. Yet the play was only Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, ranking as a pretty poor work and to-day very difficult to read. Shakespeare, on the other hand, does read extravagantly well through the greater part of his work--but large portions of the plays must pay the penalty of all works intended for one medium and presented in another. The sheer silliness of many--of most of his plots except in the Chronicle Plays--their sheer silliness and negligence regarded from the point of view of the art of the novel, become technical merit when it is a matter of recitation; bareness of plot is then a necessity, the mind having no time to turn back and pick up merely suggested clues. And of course a great deal of his work must have seemed to a man of his own delicacy of temperament much more the merest writing down to the groundlings or coarse flatterings of those in authority than that caviare to the general that he hoped to provide.