importance he himself did not suspect by collecting them in the first folio
edition of his complete dramatic works.

Shakspere's greatness rests on supreme achievement--the result of the
highest genius matured by experience and by careful experiment and
labor--in all phases of the work of a poetic dramatist. The surpassing
charm of his rendering of the romantic beauty and joy of life and the
profundity of his presentation of its tragic side we have already
suggested. Equally sure and comprehensive is his portrayal of characters.
With the certainty of absolute mastery he causes men and women to live for
us, a vast representative group, in all the actual variety of age and
station, perfectly realized in all the subtile diversities and
inconsistencies of protean human nature. Not less notable than his strong
men are his delightful young heroines, romantic Elizabethan heroines, to be
sure, with an unconventionality, many of them, which does not belong to
such women in the more restricted world of reality, but pure embodiments of
the finest womanly delicacy, keenness, and vivacity. Shakspere, it is true,
was a practical dramatist. His background characters are often present in
the plays not in order to be entirely real but in order to furnish
amusement; and even in the case of the chief ones, just as in the treatment
of incidents, he is always perfectly ready to sacrifice literal truth to
dramatic effect. But these things are only the corollaries of all
successful playwriting and of all art.

To Shakspere's mastery of poetic expression similarly strong superlatives
must be applied. For his form he perfected Marlowe's blank verse,
developing it to the farthest possible limits of fluency, variety, and
melody; though he retained the riming couplet for occasional use (partly
for the sake of variety) and frequently made use also of prose, both for
the same reason and in realistic or commonplace scenes. As regards the