ABSTRACT
Shakspere had to make more frequent and more abundant concessions than Molière because his spectators were ruder, coarser and at times more frankly brutal. Shakspere’s period is the period of Bacon and Raleigh, of Drake and Frobisher, and of the stalwart Elizabeth herself. Shakspere’s contemporaries were, first of all, Englishmen, with their threefold inheritance from the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons and the Latin-Normans. A similar judgment must be rendered in regard to the conceits scattered freely throughout the dialogue of Shakspere’s plays. Shakspere has been accused of pandering to the likings of his audience when he puts poetical speeches into the mouths of unpoetic characters; and this has been denounced as unnatural. Shakspere acted on this principle, and in so doing he is only conforming to the necessary convention of the kind of drama he is composing; and it is beside the question to insist that he is departing from the facts of real life.
