struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless rapture.” [SN: _The dramas._] And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time. Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays, and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement. And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. _The Jew of Malta_ could not be made an acting play by any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others--even from Ben Jonson--what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains? They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The _Dama Melindrosa_ would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not _Every Man in his Humour_, or _Epicene_. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains--not in all cases, indeed, but in most--a play--that is, a consistent action--carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature. [SN: _The reality of Shakespeare’s characters._]