Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Place of Shakspeare in Elizabethan Drama: Being the Annual Lecture Delivered Under the Auspices of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, July, 1914
I hold Shakspeare to be the greatest dramatist of all who have used the English tongue; I have no doubt whatever that he was the greatest of his time; and I believe him to be the greatest in all literature. You will doubtless think that that is not a very daring thing to say, that my view is not absolutely striking in its originality. Yet my words have been very carefully chosen; and it may be that, if you were to take the trouble to analyse them, you would find that they indicated a profound difference between my point of view and that of many of those whom I have here before me, at my mercy - for the time being. The daring of the remark lies, in its lack of daring. Probably but few of you have been so unfortunate as to have a journalistic education. If you had, you would know that in every political address, in every theatrical or literary or artistic criticism, there is as much note to be taken of what is not said by the orator or the critic as of what is said. I remember once a friend whom I met in a morning train, where he was, according to the habit of most of us, imbibing views he would later put forth as his own, remarking to me that some particular theatrical entertainment which had just commenced its local career must be remarkably fine. "I don't think its worth going to see," I replied. With an air of knocking me out beyond hope of recovery, he retorted, "I'm going by what the paper says"; to which I answered, "So am I." But my reply was not strictly correct: I was not going on what it said, but on what it did not say: I was reading between the lines, with a knowledge of journalistic ways and local journalistic conditions. So, when I say "I hold Shakspeare to be the greatest dramatist of all who have used the English tongue," it may perhaps be well for you to note that I do not describe him as our only dramatist; when I speak of him as the greatest dramatist of his time, I speak of him as a dramatist and nothing more; when I express my belief that he is the greatest dramatist the literature of the world has to offer us, I do not claim for him the mightiest intellect over vouchsafed to man. 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.
