THE following papers were first written as Lectures and so spoken before an audience in the University of Cambridge. Being shy of repeating myself too often in print in the guise of a lecturer, I have turned my second persons plural into third persons singular. But I am sensible that the change will only commend itself by help of the reader's good-will in his remembering all the while that these are familiar discourses rather than learned inquiries.
They seek to discover, in some of his plays, just what Shakespeare was trying to do as a playwright. This has always seemed to me a sensible way of approaching him, and one worth reverting to from time to time. For it is no disparagement to the erudition and scholarship that have so piously been heaped about Shakespeare to say that we shall sometimes find it salutary to disengage our minds from it all, and recollect that the poet was a playwright.
I must thank my brother-in-law, Mr. John Hay Lobban, for reading these pages in proof and making an index for me.
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.