with the conditions under which the dramatist did his work, or in lack of literary insight and feeling. The kindly reception which this study has received at the hands not only of students of Shakespeare, but of scholars of standing here and abroad, has confirmed the writer in his conviction that there was room for a biography which, in an unassuming spirit, should put aside the numberless technical questions and approach the author of “Hamlet” as one approaches the author of “In Memoriam ” or of " Pippa Passes." The edition of the plays and poems in connection with which this biography now appears possesses the highest authority both as regards text and critical apparatus. The text is based on the work of the editors of the Cambridge and Globe Shakespeares, and it is hardly necessary to say that no better textual work has been done in the field of Shakespearean scholarship. It involved an exhaustive collocation of the four Folios and of all the Quarto editions, and of all the later editions and commentaries. Professor Herford's Introductions present, in a very interesting form, the historical and literary data relating to the sources of the plays and poems, and an interpretation of their place and meaning in Shakespeare's work as a whole; while the notes indicate the radical departures from the old texts, suggest the most probable readings in those passages in which the old texts are "incorrigibly corrupt," and supply such other information with regard to allusions, references, and other matters as are essential to a good understanding of the text. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: POET, DRAMATIST, AND MAN CHAPTER I THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE THE history of the growth of the drama is one of the most fascinating chapters in the record of the spiritual life of the race. So closely is it bound up with that life that the unfolding of this art appears, wherever one looks deeply into it, as a vital rather than a purely artistic process. That art has ever been conceived as the product of anything less rich and deep than an unfolding of life shows how far we have been separated by historic conditions from any first-hand contact with it, any deep-going and adequate conception of what it is, and what it means in the life of the It requires a great effort of the imagination to put ourselves into the attitude of those early men who had the passions and were doing the work of men, but who had the fresh and responsive imagination of childhood; who were so closely in touch with nature that the whole world was alive to them in every sight and sound. Personification was not only natural but inevi |