I have tried in this book to trace the way I followed, step by step; for
I found it effective to rough in the chief features of the man first,
and afterwards, taking the plays in succession, to show how Shakespeare
painted himself at full-length not once, but twenty times, at as many
different periods of his life. This is one reason why he is more
interesting to us than the greatest men of the past, than Dante even, or
Homer; for Dante and Homer worked only at their best in the flower of
manhood. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has painted himself for us in
his green youth with hardly any knowledge of life or art, and then in
his eventful maturity, with growing experience and new powers, in
masterpiece after masterpiece; and at length in his decline with
weakened grasp and fading colours, so that in him we can study the
growth and fruiting and decay of the finest spirit that has yet been
born among men. This tragedy of tragedies, in which "Lear" is only one
scene--this rise to intensest life and widest vision and fall through
abysms of despair and madness to exhaustion and death--can be followed
experience by experience, from Stratford to London and its thirty years
of passionate living, and then from London to village Stratford again,
and the eternal shrouding silence.

As soon as this astonishing drama discovered itself to me in its tragic
completeness I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been set forth
long ago in detail by Shakespeare's commentators, and so, for the first
time, I turned to their works. I do not wish to rail at my forerunners
as Carlyle railed at the historians of Cromwell, or I should talk, as he
talked, about "libraries of inanities...conceited dilettantism and
pedantry...prurient stupidity," and so forth. The fact is, I found all
this, and worse; I waded through tons of talk to no result. Without a
single exception the commentators have all missed the man and the story;
they have turned the poet into a tradesman, and the unimaginable tragedy