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INTRODUCTION
The authority of Shakespeare among men of supreme genius does not diminish nor is it brought to a standstill by time. It grows. Familiarity with his work neither stales our delight in it nor reduces our wonder at its variety ; for our amazement at the seventh performance of Hamlet is greater than it was at the first. That is as it should be. The mind of a man of genius is not immediately comprehended, but must be approached many times before its fullness is seen. We can grasp the contents of a penny paper at one glance, but must look often into the writings of great men before we begin to understand all that they have to tell us. This is not to say that the contents of a work of genius are more obscure than the contents of a penny paper : it is to say that the contents of the penny paper are less than those of the work of genius. A hill is more easily surveyed than a mountain whose entire height, indeed, may never be visible to us at any time or all the time. So it is with Shakespeare. We cannot take him in our stride, observing all his points after a swift look, but must remain with him until we have learnt his high features, when we will be content to stay for ever in his company because of the multitude of little pleasant corners in his work which are revealed to us only after much patient exploration. This man of genius reveals himself, as all men of genius do, in a succession of amazements, so that his authority over our minds and love rises from respect to submission. Even when his head is hidden from us by some wisp of cloud, we are aware that there is more to be seen : we are never deluded into the belief that we have seen all that there is to see. His equals, ^schylus, Sophocles, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Milton, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw, Hardy, and a hundred others, may have greater command over individual minds, but none of them has so much command over a multitude of minds ; and each of them is more liable than he is to be taken for granted and to dwindle into temporary obscurity. This marvel can hardly be explained, but it is apparent. In the three centuries that have passed since Shakespeare was born, his appeal to the imagination of mankind has steadily increased. Nor has the response to it been made without considered judgment. The deliberate decision of the richest and the simplest minds, after much inquify and some detraction, is this : that Shakespeare, in some extraordinary and
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