What effrontery it then appears to offer an interpretation of this
play -- what folly, to add yet another to the already far too many
books on Shakespeare! Why attempt to swell superfluity, and with
so small prospect of success? To such questions this book must of
course itself give the answer; if an answer could have been given
more briefly, the book need not have been written. But mere
civility to the reader asks at least some explanation of the devotion
of a whole book to a single play -- and all the more for this reason:
any book involves partnership between writer and reader, and in
the particular partnership I propose the reader's patience will be
required. Not on account of difficulty: difficult as the play is, what
I have to say is at bottom simple, and it can be said simply if it is
said slowly. It is the reader's consent to slow progress that I require,
together with a suspension of judgement for so long as the case is
under consideration, and a resolute effort to lighten memory of
certain associations, accompaniments to the reading of Shake-
speare's plays so habitual that their presence goes unnoticed. There
are for us now two big impediments to understanding, particu-
larly of those plays which may be for convenience called romantic,
because they are founded on extant romances -- that is, on fictitious
narrative. One of these impediments is so insidious that it is hard to
recognize; the other, so obvious that it is hard to take it seriously.

Between us and Elizabethan drama stands a familiarity with the
novel which, being early formed and lying deep, is seldom taken
into conscious reckoning. Furthermore, it is romantic novels with
which we first become acquainted, and the English ¹ romantic
novel is directly sprung from the English way of reading Shake-
speare. Thus our reactions to his plays have been insensibly modi-
fied by those very changes which are a condition of life for their
offspring.

The other difficulty is likely to appear ridiculous when first
formulated: we are possessed of information at once too full and
too partial. These plays, I believe, were more intelligible to those
who first discovered their connections and origins than they are to
us, because the discoverers not only found, but continued to read,
the stuff of which Shakespeare had made use in its proper context,

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