28 L. A. Sherman 



nor Lear, and we feel the same sympathy with them at the end 

 as at the middle or the beginning. But in Macbeth we are con- 

 scious of having been dealt with unfairly. We find ourselves at 

 the close in the plight of naughty children who have repeated a 

 moral experiment, and learn once more that connivance in wrong- 

 doing must end in regret and shame. Macbeth is thus, of all 

 Shakespeare's work, an immoral play. We have been forced, 

 through the author's knowledge of our minds, tO' commit our- 

 selves tO' a cause and course that we finally repudiate. One 

 grows hospitable to the notion, after this experience, that Shake- 

 speare wrote the play to order, — perhaps to gratify a Stuart's 

 pride in a prophesied kingship and origin. 



Ill 



Quiller-Couch again, in his lecture (pp. 72 ff.) on ^ Midsum- 

 mer-Night's Dream, formulates the purpose of this volume : 



I do suggest that we can immensely increase our delight in Shakespeare 

 and strengthen our understanding of him if, as we read him again and 

 again, we keep asking ourselves how the thing was done. I am sure that- 

 hopeless as complete success must be — by this method we get far nearer 

 to the rb tL 9jv elvai of a given play than by searching among ' sources ' and 

 ' origins,' by debating how much Shakespeare took from Chaucer's Knight's 

 Tale, or how much he borrowed from Golding's Ovid, or how much 

 Latin he learned at Stratford Grammar School, or how far he anticipated 

 modern scientific discoveries, or why he gave the names " Pease-blossom," 

 " Cobweb," " Moth," " Mustard-Seed " to his fairies. 



This is a noble and sufficient motive. The common sense of 

 scholars is coming to recognize that the question of where the 

 hair and feathers and spears of grass come from with which the 

 robin weaves her nest, is of minor moment. The nest's the 

 thing, — how it is made fast from the beginning to the double fork 

 of a tree, how rounded into symmetry, and made soft and warm 

 for new-hatched young. If we cannot go back to the art, the 

 instinct that guides the making of the marvel, let us not flatter 

 ourselves into the belief that identifying materials is identifying 

 the processes that use them. ' Workmanship,' let us remember, 

 does not begin until processes begin, and processes involve art. 

 The greatest thing in literature is the art of Shakespeare. It is 



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