ABSTRACT
Empson might not disapprove of one's pondering a poem ofhis in terms of its story, since he has always stuck up for story as one of the great things about literature. Obviously so, one would have hoped, for a novel ora play. OfVirginia Woolf, Empson remarked that 'the impressionist method, the attempt to convey directly your own attitude to things, how you connect one thing with another, is in a sense fallacious; it tries to substitute for telling a story, as the main centre of interest, what is in fact one of the byproducts of telling a story' (S crutinies 11, 193 1). Which drew hirn to Shakespeare: 'Even those delicate interconnections on which the impressionist method depends ... need a story to make them intelligible, and even if Shakespeare (since I have dragged hirn in) could afford to abandon hirnself to these delicious correspondences he had first to get a strong and obvious story which would be effective on the stage.'
