Excerpt from The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, Vol. 1: The First Quarto, 1591, Which Shakspere Rewrote (About 1595) As His "Life and Death of King John"; A Facsimile by Photolithography, From the Unique Original in the Capell Collection at Trinity College, Cambridge For, as a matter of fact, very few purely literary critics see how all-important such skill is to every dramatist - what it has done, above all, for Shakespeare. The principles and details of the con struction of plays for the stage, their division into acts and scenes, and the minor rules which regulate such matters as entrances, exits, and so forth, may seem but small things compared with the power which creates living characters, the genius which produces the highest poetry; yet those lesser qualities were in very truth indispensable to his universal fame. Shakespeare would never have been read as Widely, nor studied as closely, as he now is by every class, had he not been acted always and everywhere There is not an evening in the year during which at some provincial theatre in England some play of Shakespeare's is not being acted; on an emergency, country managers will tell you, we always put up Hamlet. No other dramatist ever kept the stage for three hundred years; no other dramatist ever bore translation into every tongue; no other ever so pleased every class of audience, from the-roughs of California to the most cultivated gatherings of artists, poets, ' critics. It cannot be his poetry, his philosophy, his drawing of character, which have thus supremely fitted him for the stage; they could hardly tell so through bad acting and bad translation. It is the way in which he makes the framework of his plots, in which he presents his story and his characters, that gives force to his strong situations, and secures their effect, under however unfavourable circumstances. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.