XIV. Shakespeare's Life: Part I
XV. Shakespeare's Life: Part II

INDEX



INTRODUCTION


This book has grown out of a series of articles contributed to "The
Saturday Review" some ten or twelve years ago. As they appeared they
were talked of and criticized in the usual way; a minority of readers
thought "the stuff" interesting; many held that my view of Shakespeare
was purely arbitrary; others said I had used a concordance to such
purpose that out of the mass of words I had managed, by virtue of some
unknown formula, to re-create the character of the man.

The truth is much simpler: I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood,
chiefly for the stories; every few years later I was fain to re-read
them; for as I grew I always found new beauties in them which I had
formerly missed, and again and again I was lured back by tantalizing
hints and suggestions of a certain unity underlying the diversity of
characters. These suggestions gradually became more definite till at
length, out of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear more and
more insistent the accents of one voice, and out of the crowd of faces,
began to distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer;
for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing with her soul in
her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron the face of the beloved.