a theatre is of course possible, but can neither be affirmed nor denied
with any profit in default of the least fragment of historic or
traditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch of his
hand in plays of whose history we know no more than that they were acted
on the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the restless
leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no clue by
which the student who simply seeks to know what can be known with
certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided towards any safe
issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable and more presumptuous than
this is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an authentic play of
Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts of the same poem
to different dates by the same pedagogic rules of numeration and
mensuration which they would apply to the general question of the order
and succession of his collective works. This vivisection of a single
poem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship, an excursion beyond the
bounds of bare proof, from which the wanderer may chance to bring back,
if not such treasure as he went out to seek, yet some stray godsend or
rare literary windfall which may serve to excuse his indulgence in the
seemingly profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a pure
impertinence to affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps be
admissible as a suggestion offered with the due diffidence of modest and
genuine scholarship; to assert on the strength of a private pedant's
personal intuition that such must be the history or such the composition
of a great work whose history he alone could tell, whose composition he
alone could explain, who gave it to us as his genius had given it to him.

From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keep my
humbler course at a safe distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallows
of theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be certain
of safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption, though never so plausible,